


The Bottle Imp

by I Am Your Spy (GroteskBurlesque)



Series: Departure Points [2]
Category: Fargo (2014)
Genre: Ableist Language, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Fix-It, Homophobic Language, Human Trafficking, Kid Fic, M/M, Original Character(s), Past Child Abuse, Poor Life Choices, References to Drugs, Road Trips, quite fluffy despite the tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-22
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-03-25 07:39:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 64,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3802255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GroteskBurlesque/pseuds/I%20Am%20Your%20Spy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Messrs. Numbers and Wrench try to do the right thing for once, and, accordingly, find themselves on the run with a briefcase full of cash, three kilos of cocaine, and an 11-year-old drug mule. (Sequel to "The Hedgehog's Dilemma.")</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Inheritance

**Author's Note:**

> I thought I'd gotten these guys out of my system. Apparently, I have not gotten these guys out of my system. Then I went perusing Tumblr tags and couldn't get Wrenchers kidfic out of my head.
> 
> Accordingly, here is my take on that.
> 
> I hesitate to throw too many tags at this thing and it is about as fluffy as I get, but be warned that it does contain some references to bad things happening to children, as well as homophobic and ableist language and general grimdarkness. If I've omitted something that you think should be tagged and warned for, do let me know.

_Fargo, 1983_

The boy rolls over and reaches for the squashed pack of cigarettes on the nightstand, and his bedmate rumbles, “Not in here.” 

The second young man—his name is Drew, not that it matters, and he is a blushing, corn-fed Midwestern goy a few years older than the wiry, black-haired kid sprawled messily on the sheets beside him—is just so _cute_ that when he thinks he’s authoritative. The boy lights a cigarette anyway, blowing out a slow stream of smoke that eddies above the unmade bed, then offers the pack to Drew.

“Asshole,” Drew says, before taking one and lighting up. “I’m never getting the deposit back.”

The boy snorts. “Do you know who I am?”

His companion’s eyes, prairie-blue— _dazzling,_ really—keep his own gaze for a moment. “Should I?”

He smokes instead of answering, languid and blissful in the afterglow. “You don’t need to worry about the fucking deposit, okay?” he says, then, gallantly: “I’ll take care of you.” He is 22 years old, and in love for the first time, or at least ready to go another round.

“So,” Drew says. “What exactly _do_ you do?”

No shortage of answers to that one, but he says, “I’m still in school,” irritated at how squeaky his voice sounds.

“You _are_ legal, though, right?” Drew reaches over and pinches his cheek—obviously, he has _no idea_ —and says, “I thought you were older.” It’s the scruffy beard that does it, and the tattoos. He hasn’t been carded since he was fifteen. “What’re you studying?”

“American Lit. Doesn’t matter, anyway, I’m _fated_ ,” he gives the word an echo of melodrama, of doom, “to go into the family business.” He stubs out his cigarette in a mug and runs his foot over Drew’s bare calf. There’s nothing like thinking about his future to make him crave distraction. 

Which is when he hears the unmistakable clatter of a lock being picked. Drew’s lock. _Fuck._ He pulls the sheet up to his neck and scrambles for something that can be used as a weapon—the lamp will have to do, the knife’s in the back pocket of his jeans, all the way across the room—while Drew, oblivious, innocent Drew, who has no idea what he’s picked up at a bar and dragged home, what he’s gotten himself into, takes another long drag of his cigarette.

The door opens, and the boy sees his cousin Aaron silhouetted in the sickly fluorescent of the hallway. The placid expression on Drew’s freckled face hasn’t turned to concern or fear, even with the intrusion, and he realizes he’s been sold out.

Aaron ignores Drew altogether in favor of his loudly cursing cousin. “Get your pants on,” he says. “We’re going for a ride.”

* * *

“Are you going to kill me?” the boy asks in the car. 

Aaron laughs. They grew up like brothers, but Aaron’s a stranger now, already one of _them_. Already a man. “What’s the point?” he asks. “You’re just going to die of that AIDS thing, or whatever, the way you’re going.”

He doesn’t speak again for the rest of the trip.

* * *

“Your late father,” his uncle—Aaron’s father—informs him, “God rest his soul, is rolling in his grave.” 

He knows he’s in trouble. Part of him doesn’t even give a fuck. He doesn’t want this, he never asked for this, he wants to write papers about symbolism in Melville and smoke weed and fuck like it’s his job. He’s sick of the Chinese restaurant and its greasy, overcooked fish, even sicker of the mysterious goings-on upstairs.

“Well,” he drawls. “The fat fuckhead could probably use the exercise.”

The old man reaches across the table and slaps him. Hard. It stings nearly as bad as Drew’s betrayal; who’d have thought the old bastard had so much strength in him?

“Tell me Drew’s not on payroll,” the boy grits out. “At least tell me that.”

“Forget about him,” his uncle says, in that cold tone that suggests Drew’s going to find himself lying among garbage bags in a dumpster by morning. “Forget about all of this. I was wrong about you.”

“The fuck you were.” He waves at Aaron, watching from a table at the front of the restaurant. “I’m worth ten of him.”

“You’re competent,” his uncle agrees. “But you’re not _serious_. And so you are not third-floor material. You understand?”

“Because I’m a fag,” he sneers. He knows—and never mind how he knows—that he’s far from being the only queer in the syndicate. These days, they’re a multiethnic melting pot with a generous benefits plan. Effectiveness exists uneasily with bigotry, if it exists at all.

“Because you don’t understand _sacrifice._ ” His uncle sounds disappointed in him. “You think I care what you do in your spare time? Who you fuck? But a man has responsibilities. Are you going to get married? To a _woman_? Raise children to carry on your father’s name?”

There’s one thing he’s sure of: He’s known he wanted the family name dead and buried with him long before he was even positive he was gay. Soon enough, they’ll give him a new name anyway.

“I always liked you,” his uncle says, and the pathetic thing is that it’s true. “But there’s no place at this table for a man who doesn’t understand family.”

He understands family just fine. Family’s why he’ll drop out of college before the year is over, why, over two decades from now, long after his uncle is dead, it will be Aaron’s brains oozing down the wall of the third-floor office and not his. Family is why he’ll instead lie broken, in a bank of snow painted crimson in his blood. 

Family, as far as he’s concerned, can go fuck itself.

His uncle waves a tired hand. “Enough of this. Let’s move on.” He passes a paper bag, the object concealed within unmistakable in shape and weight. “I have a job for you.”


	2. Collision Course

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wrench and Numbers find out their new employers aren't much of an improvement over the old ones.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Ableist language.

_Somewhere outside Albuquerque, 2007_

The bullet clips a few twigs off the mesquite tree. Its branches shiver before the bullet passes beyond sight and influence, to lie forever buried somewhere in the red dust and the dry grass. Numbers grimaces and jams in a new clip, squeezes off another shot as he squints into the bright sunlight.

He’s had nightmares that go just like this, where he fires the gun over and over again and can’t hit a thing. In his dreams, there’s always more at stake than an empty Corona bottle that sits untouched on a flat rock a foot from the tree, but there’s the constant ache in his lower back and the gruesome mess of his throat to remind him that the stakes _can_ always be raised, without notice or mercy. It’s inevitable, really, and when that day comes, he’ll have to do better than hitting a stationary bottle 20 feet away.

He tucks the gun back into its holster and sits down, dragging a hand through his now-perpetually-unkempt hair. It’s no good. He lights a cigarette. Given the hell his body has gone through in the past year, he’s been trying to quit lately, but it’s the only thing that stops the shaking once it starts. He doesn’t even give a shit about what the dust is going to do to his pants.

There is, after all, a place in this world for an assassin who can’t hear, even for one who can’t speak. But not for one who can’t shoot.

Wrench is at his side instantly, mistaking his frustration for pain and kneading his shoulders. It feels good, but he still shrugs his partner off, the cigarette clenched between his teeth, and signs, _Not in the mood._

Wrench looks like he’s about to argue—after all, he was the one who drove them all the way out here so that Numbers’ pathetic aim doesn’t shit up the firing range and threaten their ability to intimidate their way through the Albuquerque underworld—then apparently thinks better of it. Numbers actually wishes he’d argue. Instead, he lopes for the car, pauses, and then, as if to demonstrate exactly how little he cares for his partner’s increasingly frequent bouts of self-pity, spins around and with his own gun, blasts the bottle off its perch in a spray of shattered glass. 

Numbers stubs out his cigarette, shoves the remainder into his jacket pocket, and flips him the finger. _This is a pristine natural environment._

 _Jealous?_  

Numbers slams the car door closed harder than he has to, harder probably than the rusted-out shitbox can take, and slumps in the seat, breathing through his teeth. Wrench gives him a few minutes to rage, his lips shaping soundless, impotent syllables, before sliding a hand over his and holding it there.

He doesn’t say it’ll get better. Both of them know it’s unlikely to. It’s been almost seven months since Duluth. Their scars have faded as much as they ever will. Numbers has grown around them like a tree through a fence; where one can’t recover, one adapts. He can compensate for his mangled vocal cords—fuck, it’s not like Wrench has ever needed to speak, and with the two of them together, everyone just assumes he’s deaf too—and he can move carefully around nerve damage. He is, and this cannot be overstated even in his bleakest moods, incredibly fucking lucky.

But. It’s been seven months, and the tremor in his hands hasn’t gone away. He’d wake up screaming every night except that the air behind it dies somewhere between his lungs and his throat. There’s the _other thing,_ which they can’t even talk about. And there’s the certainty that they walk a delicate balance here; their previous lives will catch up with them eventually. 

Wrench pats his hand, then asks, _Do you really want me to clean up the glass?_

That’s the worst of it, the persistent worry that Wrench pities him. Oh, he claims not to, and he’s just as bitchy and brittle-tempered as he used to be, but Numbers knows he does. Why else would he stick around, beyond a sad sense of obligation?

The desert’s survived worse than a broken bottle or two, and they have a job tomorrow. Numbers shakes his head. He’s alive, but hopelessly defeated.

 _Let’s just_ _go home._

* * *

Olivia rides up from El Paso in the seat right in front of the bathroom. The air conditioning’s busted and the interior of the Greyhound bus is a thick, boiling soup. She shrugs off her hoodie and stuffs it into the corner of the seat. She’s already choking when a woman dashes up the aisle and flings herself into the bathroom and Olivia absolutely, no doubt about it, knows what’s about to happen. She’s even got her elbow crooked around her face in preparation for the onslaught. 

It doesn’t help. The reeks of liquid shit floats through the back of the bus, and she’s stuck there for two more hours breathing in the stench.

The old lady next to her must have a faulty sense of smell or something, because she just keeps frowning through a Sudoku game like they haven’t just been plunged into a steaming, bubbling sewer. Olivia pulls herself over the top of the seat. The bus is pretty crowded, but there are a few gaps—either some very short people, or empty spaces. She glances at the old lady and then down at her Minnie Mouse backpack, clutched on her lap, and determines that it’s not worth the risk of asking her to move.

The bus seat upholstery is deep blue with diagonal paint splashes of red and magenta and green; why anyone thought it looked nice is beyond her. Sniffing the air, she decides it’s probably because the horrible pattern makes it harder to see stains, and then they don’t need to clean the bus as often.

_ Gross.  _

Her fingers dig into the straps of her backpack. They gave it to her at the bus stop and she couldn’t help wrinkling up her nose. It’s too obvious; she’ll be twelve in a few months, and little for her age or not, it’s way too babyish for her. It’ll draw attention. She pushes her forehead into the window and tries—really tries—to relax her fingers. If she grips it too hard…

The old lady turns her head and Olivia thinks she must have seen something. She must suspect. Maybe it was the stupid backpack that gave her away.

“Mint?” she asks, and Olivia nearly vomits into her mouth.

“Yeah,” she says, her hands clammy despite the heat. “Um. Thanks.” The old lady smiles at her like she’s a dog that’s just performed a cool trick. She takes the mint. It’s ashy dry on her tongue. 

“First time traveling by yourself?”

Olivia pretends not to know English, and eventually the old lady gives up and returns to her Sudoku.

Olivia settles into her seat, arms wrapped around the Minnie Mouse backpack and the three kilos of cocaine inside it, as the bus hurtles along U.S. Route 25, bound for Albuquerque.

* * *

Olivia’s stuck waiting nearly an hour at the bus depot before a man comes to retrieve her. He’s fat, maybe in his forties, oily black hair retreating at his temples, and introduces himself as Bruno. He smells musty, like an old suitcase, though even the stale odor of his car is a step up over the Greyhound. She has a few moments of wondering whether he’s the right person—they didn’t tell her anything about who she was meeting—but he seems to know to find her. Maybe they told him to look for the backpack. He gets her to sit in the back. She puts the backpack on the seat beside her but keeps one hand wrapped in the strap, just in case.

“Do you like music?” he asks her in Spanish. Olivia shrugs. He puts on a classic rock station, too loud for her liking. He keeps staring at her reflection in the rearview mirror, and she slides down in the seat. “Is this your first time?” 

 _Funny_ , she thinks, _just like the lady on the bus_. Olivia shakes her head. They sent her up to Las Cruces on a trial run a few weeks ago and she’d done fine. Before that she’d been running errands for the Morales family for months. She’s good at this. She knows how not to talk.

“Oh,” he says, drawing the syllable out into a chuckle. “A real little pro.” She wishes she could shrink even smaller.

They stop at a dilapidated farmhouse, its windows all busted out, boarded over, and then busted up some more. There’s already two other cars pulled up. Olivia picks up her backpack and slings it over one shoulder, and follows Bruno up to the wooden porch that slouches, amid the tall yellow grass, like the skeleton of some dead beast. Three chairs sit out on the porch, their metal legs rusted and bent, occupied by three hard-faced white men. The remaining two guys are standing, and everyone’s armed except the old guy reclining in the chair with the briefcase flat across his lap, so he must be the boss.

Olivia gives them all a once over. The boss is in an expensive suit, but he’s taken off the jacket in the afternoon swelter, and there are damp patches under his arms and around his neck. He doesn’t look happy. Bruno must have left him waiting. Two other men, younger guys in jeans and cut-off t-shirts, flank him on either side.

The two men standing behind the chairs look even more pissed off, and they have the firepower to back it up. One’s dressed in black despite the heat and looks like a movie mobster. If he’s got any facial expressions, they’re hidden beneath a thick black beard and dark sunglasses. He’s covered with tattoos, over his arms and what she can see of his neck. He’d be terrifying, if it weren’t for the other one leaning against the porch column, who manages to make everyone else look slightly less scary by comparison.

He’s the biggest man she’s ever seen, and he’s holding the biggest gun she’s ever seen too. His face is shaded under a trucker hat, so she can’t quite tell if he’s watching her with boredom or disdain. He’s got muttonchops and cowboy boots and she’s never seen a gangster who looked like he cared less appearing dignified. But then, she guesses, if you already look like you eat knives and shit nails, there’s no real need to dress the part.

Olivia glances up at Bruno, then slides the backpack off her shoulder and puts it down on the porch steps. Should she have crept closer? She doesn’t want to offend the boss, but she also doesn’t want to come within reach of the big guy’s massive arms. Not that it matters, with all the guns everyone’s packing, but while any of them could kill her, he looks like he could _vaporize_ her.

The boss smirks at the backpack and gestures for one of his men to open it. The plastic zipper catches and he glares like he’s about to rip it to shreds, then tears it free to reveal the packages, nestled amongst pink underwear and socks and wrapped in shiny paper with a balloon print. He hands it to his boss.

The boss pries a corner open and shakes some of the powder loose into his finger. He rubs it on his gums. Nods, pleased. Tapes it back up. 

“Put it in the car,” he tells another of his men, but just as he’s about to collect the packages, Bruno shakes his head.

“Money first.”

The boss utters a disapproving cluck. He opens the suitcase, scrutinizes it for a few agonizingly long seconds, and holds it out in front of him. Bruno shoves Olivia forward, and she takes a few halting steps forward to take it from him. She notices—because every instinct tells her to never for a second take her eyes off those guns—the bearded guy make a weird series of hand gestures to the freakishly tall guy.

She brings the suitcase to Bruno. He unlatches it. Olivia shifts from one foot to another, like she has to pee—which she does, come to think of it, and why did she have to realize that _now?_ —waiting for him to count the money.

“There’s an extra $500 in here,” he observes, and why did he say that, why not just take the money and get the hell away from this creepy place and these creepy people? Can she get back to the car, or will they shoot her? She’s done everything she’s supposed to do, rode a stinky bus for three hours carrying someone else’s drugs, and these people are freaking her out, and she’s _done._  

“Sure,” the boss says.

“What for?” 

His finger unfurls, slow and sure and more deadly than any gun, to point at Olivia. 

“I assume those terms are acceptable to your employer.”

Olivia doesn’t scream. There’s no point. There’s no one who’s going to rescue her, not all the way out here, not with who she is and what she’s done, not with what she’ll be, when the transaction is complete. 

Several things happen, more or less simultaneously.

The tall guy gestures at the bearded guy, who gestures back, and _oh,_ they’re talking in sign language, and she was wrong in thinking that they looked pissed off before, because _this,_ as it turns out, is what they look like when they’re _actually_ pissed off.

One of the thugs in the chair notices this conversation. He turns to the tall guy and whaps him lightly on the arm. He rolls his words out slowly: “Pay attention, you fucking retard.”

Which is when the bearded guy pulls out his gun and splatters the goon’s brains across the front door and the faded wooden beams of the porch.

All hell breaks loose. Olivia drops to the ground, her hands over her ears, and crawls through the grass for the car. She peeks up once to see Bruno topple over, his face flensed from his skull, and squeezes her eyes shut. She braces herself for the impact of a bullet any second now, and of course this is how she’s going to die, caught in the crossfire of a drug deal gone bad, of course this is why there’s all the “Say No to Drugs” shit in school, and who was she to think she was smarter than that?

A massive hand closes around her arm and yanks her upright, and she’s face-to-denim-clad torso with the big guy, who is even bigger now that he’s practically on top of her. He doesn’t speak. He just sets her on her feet, and stares, and it’s all she can do to not piss herself.

The bearded guy casually strolls off the porch, past the corpses of his employer and two colleagues, and collects first the suitcase of cash, then, with a smirk, the Minnie Mouse backpack with the coke stuffed inside. He tosses them in the trunk of one of the cars, and launches into another rapid-fire series of gestures. 

The big guy marches her over to the car, his fingers iron around her upper arm, and sits her in the back seat. She considers running, very briefly, and mostly just on principle. He swings around to the front seat and starts up the engine, but doesn’t hit the gas. 

They all sit in the car, the two men in the front and Olivia in the back and probably like thirty grand in the trunk, and that’s before counting the coke. They all sit very still and no one moves a muscle, least of all Olivia, who is going to die before her twelfth birthday. She doesn’t want to think of what these two men will do to her first. Maybe she shouldn’t have hit the ground when the shooting started. Maybe it would have been better to die then and there rather than to suffer through what’s coming next.

The bearded guy twists around in the passenger seat, and she sees that it’s not just a tattoo on his neck—the ink is covering a lumpy scar that looks like something tried to rip his head off and somehow failed to finish the job. 

He tugs at the strap of his seatbelt and points to her. She freezes, momentarily confused, then blinks.

_What. The. Fuck._

She fastens her seatbelt and he sits back in his seat, apparently satisfied, taps the other man on the arm, and that’s how she gets herself kidnapped by two wanted criminals on the lam—who are, it seems, incredibly concerned about vehicular safety—with a trunk full of drugs and blood money and four dead bodies behind them.


	3. The Mission

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kidnapping, shower sex, and existential angst. So it goes.

This was not how Numbers planned to have this go down. At all.

Yeah, of course he wishes they had more money. Killing pays exponentially better than just standing around with a gun and looking impressive, but it carries a fuck of a lot more risk, and he’s past all that now. Besides, his life has narrowed to a series of small routines, contained within a neighborhood, within a bachelor apartment above an auto shop; at this point, there’s not much he actually _needs_. 

But. If there’s one thing he’s learned in almost three decades of morally and spiritually bankrupt employment under people several degrees worse than he is, it’s that nothing, fucking _nothing,_ ever goes according to plan.

He nudges Wrench’s arm. Wrench signs, _Driving—_ as if he’s never talked and driven before—and Numbers exhales a sigh of utter exasperation that is completely lost on its intended audience.

The little kid in the back hears, though. “Hey,” she says. “Hey. Are you actually deaf?”

He shakes his head, pointing to his throat, then makes the symbol for “deaf” and points at Wrench. 

“He is, you aren’t. But you can’t talk.” The girl’s voice is oddly flat, like she doesn’t care one way or the other, and he realizes it’s because she thinks they’re going to kill her. They _are_ going to have to kill her. Fuck. It’s not like there’s a choice, but no one told him that there was going to be a kid there.

She’s a tiny little thing too, with big dark eyes and long black hair. Just perfect. Probably carts all kinds of shit across state lines, maybe even across the border, without anyone batting an eyelash, that’s how harmless and innocent and cute she looks. Just her fucking luck that she was there on payday.

He’s never actually shot a kid before. He never even sees any kids. He doesn’t know what he’d say to this one even if he could talk.

“I won’t tell anyone about you,” the girl says. It’s that stage, the bit where they beg for their lives, where they bargain. Normally it’s pretty funny, and he gets off on the power trip, but not today. “I promise.”

He pushes up his sunglasses, glad he doesn’t have to meet her eyes.

“I have to pee,” she says suddenly. When he doesn’t respond, she says, “No, I mean it. I don’t wanna piss myself when I die.” 

Numbers turns forwards and relays the message to his partner. Wrench pulls over. There’s nothing but scrubland in any direction.

“Not _here_ ,” the girl says. “Jesus. Are you guys perverts or something?” 

_Take her to a gas station,_ Numbers signs. Wrench shoots him a glare and starts up the car again. What the fuck kind of animal uses a kid as a drug courier, anyway? He should track down whoever sent her and stuff the schmuck’s cock in his mouth.

Wrench pats her down for a cell phone and insists on standing outside the washroom while she goes inside, just in case she tries to make a run for it. He leans against the hood of a car, impassive. _She can ID us,_ he signs. 

Numbers nods. Of course she can. _I don’t want to do a kid,_ he says finally.

_Neither do I._ Wrench is blinking, like he’s surprised Numbers even raised the possibility. Of course he is. Wrench—who stops to pet strange dogs on the sidewalk, who wouldn’t kill a weaselly little shitbag like Nygaard without a confession, who spent months nursing Numbers back to health even though he’s of no conceivable use to anyone—isn’t about to kill the girl, or even let Numbers kill her. He’s got some idea that’s inevitably even stupider, and Numbers is going to go along with it because he loves the giant moron more than fucking oxygen, and he doesn’t see any better way out of the situation.

This decided, Wrench slips an arm around his waist in a manner that he probably thinks is discreet—it isn’t—and squeezes his ass. _Notice anything?_  

He notices a lot, actually, like that the fucker in the pickup truck with the NRA bumper sticker and the Jesus fish caught a glimpse of Wrench’s _entirely subtle_ move just now. But that’s not what Wrench means and they both know it.

The thing is this: He got off easy from the stabbing, considering that he’d been technically dead for a few moments there. With the way his hands shake, though, he hasn’t been able to shoot for shit ever since.

And worse, far worse, is what’s happened between him and Wrench. They’re intimate, sure, maybe more so than they were before in some ways. Wrench can’t take his hands off him when they’re alone together, spooning around him at night, covering him with soft, whiskery kisses. It’s fucking amazing and he wouldn’t trade it for anything, but it’s not, well, _fucking_.

He knows it’s not physiological, any more than the tremor is. PTSD or something like that, only he can’t walk into a shrink’s office—even if he could afford it—and explain that he’s been left a shuddering wreck of a human being after a hit got complicated. The whole lesbian bed death started out because they were both afraid of breaking each other—and really, they were so fucked up after Duluth that it was a distinct possibility—and then the slow, nauseous process of morphine withdrawal, but he’d just assumed that everything would be back to normal once their wounds had healed as much as they were going to. There’d been a few awkward grope sessions and blowjobs and once or twice he’d offered to let Wrench fuck him, just to see if anything happened—just to _keep_ him—but the truth is he hasn’t been able to get it up since Malvo left him bleeding to death in the snow.

Wrench is fine. Wrench can somehow take a bullet in his chest and another in his gut and be up walking around a few weeks with a couple of badass—and, okay, sexy—scars to show for it. Numbers, conversely, is a shambling fucking disaster, and had been resigned to it for whatever remained of his life. 

Until, half an hour ago, when he’d shot two men in the head without flinching or missing, the second at a distance of at least fifteen feet, and his dick’s been rock hard ever since.

This might be a good sign, but it’s also phenomenally awkward.

The washroom door opens and the girl comes out, shaking her still-dripping hands. She looks up at the two men. She’s clearly terrified, and trying very hard to hide it. 

“So,” she says. “What did I miss?”

* * *

They’ve booked a hotel room out by the airport. Numbers hasn’t stayed in an actual hotel in years. Sure, his family might have been connected, but once it was clear he was good enough to murder for the syndicate but not good enough to get his own office, he was just another asset as far as they were concerned and he’d stayed wherever he was told to. Wrench never walks into a hotel unless it’s to shoot someone staying there. It’s anonymous and very clean and since they booked in advance, no one raises an eyebrow at two disheveled men walking in with a small girl who is very obviously not related to either of them. Numbers thinks, with no small measure of disgust, that it might happen a lot around here.

The girl doesn’t scream. Maybe she’s too frightened, maybe she’s bright enough to notice that it would have been easier for them to kill her off the highway and she’s safer in a building where people can hear things like gunshots and screaming. Either way, she follows them to their room and sits, back stiff and shoulders quivering, on the chair by the desk. Wrench dumps the bags—funny, that it seems like so much money, given what the syndicate could burn through in a single night back in its heyday—and paces the room, ostensibly looking for vulnerabilities, but Numbers has a strong feeling that he’s just admiring how _clean_ it is. 

If there wasn’t a kid there, they could take turns fucking each other on both of the beds, but they’ve traumatized the girl more than enough for one day.

_We need to talk about this,_ he signs.

Wrench shrugs and goes to stand over by the bathroom sink. He turns on the tap and braces his hands against the counter, staring at his reflection in the huge mirror. 

The girl fidgets where she’s sitting. “Uh,” she says. What the fuck are they supposed to do about her? He glances at Wrench, who, predictably, offers no help. 

“Is it, um, him or you?” She crosses her legs, a curiously un-childlike gesture, and it takes him a second to grasp her meaning. “That I’m supposed to...” His stomach heaves. He shakes his head, keeps as much distance as he can from her to reach the complimentary notepad on the desk. The pen doesn’t want to write, and he jiggles it a few times before he can scrawl out, _NEVER ASK ME THAT AGAIN._

“Okay.” The girl raises her palms, like she’s _offended_ that he’s not some kind of sick pedo fuck. “So you’re just going to kill me like you did Bruno and those guys?”

Wrench spares him answering by finally emerging from the bathroom with a glass of water. He hands it to the girl; Numbers notices, watching her drink it, that he’s thirsty too, but there’s no glass for him. Wrench takes the pen and writes, _Mr. Wrench,_ pointing to himself, then _Mr. Numbers._  

She takes another sip. “Those aren’t names.” Numbers glares. “Fine. I’m not a snitch. I’m not gonna tell anyone about you. Those other guys _did_ want me for. You know. So I owe you one, basically.” She slumps in the chair. “I’m Olivia,” she says. Numbers signs out her response. It feels strange, translating again; he hasn’t had to do it much, since Wrench is practically the only person he talks to when they’re not on the job. 

Wrench writes: _Where is your family?_

The girl says, “El Paso,” and Wrench gives a little cool-I’m-from-Texas-too grin at that. Numbers rolls his eyes, even if it is kind of endearing.

_We will get you home._ Numbers glances sharply at him—not that he disagrees, but when did they decide this, exactly?

Olivia yawns. “Sorry. I’m…” She stands up and wobbles to one of the beds. “Don’t feel so good all of a sudden.”

_Did you drug her?_ Numbers signs.

_DRAMAMINE,_ Wrench spells out, pulling the sheets down so that the kid can roll into bed.

_You’re an asshole._

_We do need to talk._ He stands over the kid, his expression unreadable, until her eyes slide shut. He tucks the sheets around her, and Numbers notices how careful he is not to touch her. When it’s clear that she’s out cold, Wrench gestures towards the bathroom, shuts the door behind them, and turns the shower on. 

Numbers frowns; it’s not like the girl’s going to overhear them talking or something, and then Wrench bends down and kisses him and _oh,_ talking’s not what he had in mind. There’s still blood on his shirt—not, for once, either of theirs—and for whatever fucked up reason that no doubt says something terrible about him, that’s apparently what it takes to make his dick leap to attention again. 

The ugly denim shirt is on the floor in seconds, minus several buttons. Wrench wriggles out of his skin-tight jeans and starts on Numbers’ fly while he’s still fumbling with his own buttons, and it’s all Numbers can do to keep any of his clothing intact before Wrench manhandles him into the shower and pushes him up against the wall.

They don’t talk. Wrench drops to his knees and takes Numbers into his mouth. Numbers gets them positioned so most of the water’s hitting him and not Wrench’s face, and there’s a ledge he can collapse on if his back gives out, then buries his fingers in his partner’s damp, curly mess of hair. 

He’s missed this so very much. Wrench’s lips are hot around his dick and he rakes his nails over Numbers’ legs, like he can’t even contain himself, pushes him almost right to the edge until Numbers tightens his fist into his hair, jerks his head up, and signs, _Fuck me._  

Wrench climbs to his feet and shoves Numbers into the tile, thick fingers spreading him open while he bites and sucks at his neck. Numbers moans, a weird little strained sound that it’s just as well Wrench can’t hear. He pushes down onto his partner’s fingers until Wrench gets the hint and sinks deep into him, one hand splayed over his stomach to keep him upright and the other curled around his cock, his last reserve of restraint completely abandoned.

Between the hot steam, drawing him into a delirious trance, and the delicious burn of Wrench moving inside of him—not to mention months of agonizing near-chastity—he doesn’t last long. He comes with another airless gasp, whines as Wrench pulls out of him to soak under the showerhead. His legs shaking, he wraps his arms around his partner’s broad shoulders and kisses his scarred chest and lets Wrench hold him for a few minutes while the water streams over them and washes them clean.

It’s blissful, and as such, temporary. He stumbles out of the shower and dries himself, kicking Wrench’s bloody shirt out of the way. Wrench picks the shirt up and slips it on, looking thoughtful.

They always used to fuck after a job. That’s how the whole thing started. Or they did, until the jobs no longer involved killing, and he wants to think that it doesn’t have anything to do with that, except what if it does?

It makes perfect sense, in that annoyingly pop psychological way. He needs to be in control. There is no greater control than killing someone. Malvo knew it, so there’s no reason why it had to be such a goddamned mystery to him.

Wrench presses his palm, warm from the hot water, against the small of his back, holds it there for a while before he tugs his jeans back on and heads into the bedroom.

* * *

Later,when his eyes have found the specks of light from landing strips and air traffic control towers through the curtains, when the sleeping profile of the girl on the other bed is outlined in cold blue, Numbers signs up at the ceiling: _I have never done anything good in my life._  

He’s not even sure that Wrench catches it with the room so dark, but his partner turns, irises darkened to grey in the shadows, and signs back: _Bullshit._  

He’s killed a lot of bad men and mainly stupid ones, and okay, maybe Wrench counts sticking by a man who, by all impressions, had not encountered a lot of kindness or companionship in his pre-assassin life as a good deed, but Numbers sure as fuck doesn’t. Or at least his loyalty is mitigated by the knowledge that Wrench could have done a lot better than him if he’d wanted to. Wrench isn’t naïve, though, and he’s got to know that there’s something wrong with a guy who can’t get it up until he shoots someone first. He’s broken, he’s always been broken, and there’s something about nearly dying that brings his dysfunction into sharp, painful focus. 

_I’m a fucking monster._

Wrench shrugs. _If you’re having a midlife crisis_ , _a red convertible is fine, a hot trophy girlfriend isn’t._

Numbers shoves his shoulder and Wrench shoves him back and then restrains him in a hug that’s half comforting, half aggressive. He lies there with his head pillowed on his partner’s chest, listening to his steady heartbeat, and Wrench might be kidding about the trophy girlfriend but in all honesty, he can’t imagine ever wanting to let any other human being get this close to him.

The girl in the bed beside theirs hasn’t moved. Her lips are parted slightly in sleep, her breath a soft whistle. She’s been hauled around like someone’s chattel, expecting them to use her and discard her as men have probably done her whole life. Numbers doesn’t even like kids—though, to be fair, it’s not like he likes adults either—and he’s well aware, as Wrench is, that she’s a fuckload more of a liability if she’s left alive. 

At least they seem to be agreed that it’s worth it. There’s too much blood on his hands for redemption and besides, he believes in guilt, not absolution, but at least he can balance the ledger a bit. It’s just under four hours to El Paso—longer if they play it safe and stay off the highway—and for those hours, he’ll have a purpose in the world.

He is fully cognizant of what happened the last time they tried to do something slightly decent. By now, he thinks, the cops will have found the bodies, and out of four of them, they’ll have at least ID’d one or two. They’ll have informed the DEA. In his experience, Molly Solverson aside, cops are by and large intellectual amoebas, but it doesn’t take an evolved intelligence to figure out that if there are four dead drug dealers and no drugs at a crime scene, someone must have gotten away. The money, while far more than they’ve seen since the Fargo days, won’t get them far, and any deviation from the getaway plan they’ve talked about for weeks costs them time that they could be using to put as much distance between themselves and Albuquerque as possible.

Still, in the dark, the only sound the whir of the air conditioner above their breathing, he wants desperately for his existence to be something more than a net drain on humanity. It’s not a midlife crisis, he thinks, but there’s something to be said for having teetered on the edge of oblivion and ending up with a second chance you don’t deserve.

_Why did you shoot him?_ Wrench signs. It hadn’t been the plan; they were going to hold off, see what the El Paso people had in mind. This was only a tentative first meeting between that cartel and their employers in Albuquerque. If they’d been patient, they’d have gotten away with far more. _Because of the girl?_

Numbers shakes his head. He doesn’t like to think he’s that sentimental. He knows there are always kids in the game, though he’s never witnessed it so up close and personal, even when he was technically one himself. _He disrespected you. You didn’t hear it._  

Wrench snorts. _I take it back,_ he signs. _You are a fucking monster._  

He smiles wearily, settling in against his partner’s shoulder. _I’m your fucking monster though._

_You are,_ Wrench signs, and presses a kiss to his temple.


	4. Detours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Drive to El Paso. Ditch the kid. Find someone else to buy the drugs.
> 
> What could possibly go wrong?

Olivia jerks awake, her pulse racing, before dawn. It’s dark, and she thinks at first she’s back in the room she shares with Morales’ other girls, but the sound is different. There’s snoring—a man’s snoring, not a kid’s—and the familiar rattle from the pipes is gone. And she’s in a real bed, not the dirty mattress with Lucia’s feet in her face.

Very gingerly, she rolls over on her side. And remembers.

The two men who abducted her are asleep on the next bed. It occurs to her that even if they didn’t want to do it to her, it’s weird that they wouldn’t each just take a bed and make her sleep on the floor. The one guy, the one who called himself Mr. Wrench, has his arm draped over the other one.

It’s a queen-sized bed. Big as Wrench is, there’s enough space for both of them. Then she puts two and two together and feels like an idiot.

She’s flooded with relief. They still might murder her, but at least she’s safe from any other stuff, at least until they trade her for drugs or money or whatever it is that these two psychos want. She eyes the door. If she can just get past the bed, if she can just get through the door without one of them waking up, there’s a hotel’s worth of witnesses.

Olivia slips onto the floor. Her shoes, still on her feet, squeak on the tight weave of the carpet, and she tells herself that she only needs to get to the elevator, she just needs to get to where there are other people—

Numbers’ eyes snap open.

Her initial impression was wrong. He’s by far the scarier of the two. Wrench is huge and made out of solid muscle but he’d at least smiled at her, told her that he was going to get her home. Numbers stares at her like she’s a fly he’s about to swat.

Before she can run, he lifts Wrench’s arm up and slides free, and she wonders if he’s going to kill her just for witnessing that they’re together. She notes the care with which he moves, slowly and without a sound. It can’t be because he doesn’t want to wake his—what are they to each other, anyway? Boyfriends? Partners in crime?—the man’s deaf, after all, and he just keeps on snoring. Maybe it’s a stealthy assassin thing. The walls must be soundproofed a bit but not so much they won’t hear her if she screams. Should she scream?

He sits down at the desk and picks up the pen and pad that Wrench was using earlier. He writes, _Don’t be scared,_ and smiles up at her, which makes him approximately a hundred times scarier than he was when he wasn’t smiling.

Olivia can’t help it; she laughs, a short bubble of nervous breath. “I just saw you kill a bunch of guys,” she says. “Of course I’m scared. Are you, like, a real hit man?” It sounds so stupid when she says it out loud, but he nods.

_Retired. No bark, no bite._ He tilts his head to one side. The light that seeps in through a gap in the curtains hits the long ridge of scar tissue and casts the base of his throat into deep shadow. It’s genuinely horrible. She never, ever wants to meet whatever did that to him.

The pen scratches the paper again. _You’re safe enough. I have a soft spot for strays._ He casts his eyes in Wrench’s direction.

“You don’t seem very retired,” she says. He flaps his hand noncommittally.

_Your former employers and mine will come after us._

“Yeah,” she says. “You gonna kill them too?”

He nods, deadly serious even in his rumpled undershirt and boxers and his hair all mussed. _Tell me about the El Paso cartel._

“I don’t really know,” Olivia says. “They run a few blocks in the Triangle. Morales—he’s my—” _Owner,_ she thinks, bitterly, but she says, “—boss, he wants to go independent. That’s why he reached out to your people.” Though, the Albuquerque gangsters can’t really be his people, or he wouldn’t have shot them. And he doesn’t dress like someone who’s used to the weather here, so he’s probably from pretty far away.

_How many?_

“Maybe 15 guys in his crew,” she says. “And a lot of neighborhood kids. It’s not exactly a cartel; he’s kinda branching out on his own, seeing what he can get away with. They told me they wanted me to do the run up from Juarez, but.” She yawns. She still feels groggy, like she’s coming down with something. “Guess there are lots of kids who can do that. They wanted me for something else.”

His eyes flicker towards her, then he stands up again, brushing past her, to sit on the edge of the bed. Wrench stirs at the movement, and Numbers strokes his hair, still watching Olivia as if daring her to challenge him on it. He mimes going to sleep, then points at her bed.

“That’s it?” she asks. “You just swoop in, rescue me, and kill all the bad guys?”

His eyebrows knit together, as though he’s puzzled she’d even ask, as if it’s all incredibly obvious.

“That doesn’t happen. Things like that don’t happen. Not to people like me.”

He stares a moment longer, and she lets herself think, just for a second, that it’s sadness she sees there. Then he turns his back, and while she could try to make it to the door, she doesn’t.

She sleeps—while, in other darkened rooms, phone calls are made and plans put in motion, while Numbers, tense and hyper alert, watches the door—eventually.

* * *

Wrench is up early in the morning, insisting that they move, and Numbers hopes to hell no one’s after them yet, because no matter how many unexpected turns they take, they’re exposed, nothing but empty dry hills and wide blue sky to conceal them. He’s going to miss Albuquerque—wherever they end up is likely to be colder and darker—but he won’t miss the lack of cover the desert affords them. He puts his sunglasses on so Wrench won’t notice that he keeps nodding out.

He wakes up when they pull into yet another truck stop and gets it together enough to blearily sign, _What are you doing?_

_Breakfast._

His back creaking, Numbers reaches under the seat for the bag of Scrunyuns he vaguely remembers shoving under there. Wrench bats his hand away. _She hasn’t eaten in a day. We’re not feeding her that._

_Fine_. He opens the bag himself, exaggerating the crunching noises, even knowing that it’s not going to bother Wrench at all. The girl crinkles up her nose at him and he sticks his tongue out at her.

McDonald’s is hardly an improvement over his road snacks, but from the way Olivia stares at her hamburger before cramming it in her mouth, you’d think it was fucking three-star Michelin or some shit, though she ruins it by having no table manners.

_She eats like you do,_ Numbers signs.

_Starving,_ Wrench signs back, and Numbers forgets sometimes where Wrench came from, that he had a past before they met. He’s seriously going to put a bullet through whoever did this to the kid, and maybe save one or two more if he ever tracks down Wrench’s parents. 

Wrench stands up, his expression unchanged. _I’ll get her another one._

* * *

“Hey,” Olivia says. “Hey, Mr. Numbers?”

He twists around in the front seat.

“How do you say ‘thank you’ in sign language?”

Numbers puts a hand to his lips, then out towards her. She mimics the gesture, and he nods. He points to Wrench and tries to explain, as best as he can, that his partner can lip-read just fine. 

“I know,” the girl says. “But I wanted to thank him properly. Can you show me more?”

He looks at his watch.

_Three hours to kill,_ he signs. _Why the fuck not?_

She doesn’t understand, of course, but two hours later when they’ve drilled through the alphabet more times than he can count, she’s that much closer.

* * *

They stop again at a Walmart near Alamogordo, with far less of a pretense. Oh, Wrench is looking at rope and duct tape and the sorts of everyday supplies that one generally needs in their line of work, but no one’s fooled. Numbers sees him push the girl in the direction of the children’s clothing section and she disappears behind a rack of flowery sundresses.

Numbers starts to laugh, then stops when he sees that there are a few other people around. He knows what his laugh sounds like now, the grotesque wheeze of an old man in the final stages of emphysema, and there’s no need to inflict it on strangers. 

_What?_ Wrench signs.

_Breakfast was one thing. Clothes?_

_It would kill you to do something nice for someone?_

Olivia emerges from the change room in a pale green dress patterned with yellow sunflowers and neon patterned leggings that don’t match at all. He notices a hole in the toe of her running shoe. She twirls around in a blur of cotton and long black hair, a bright little spark of color in the drab grey aisles. She giggles, and it’s the first time he’s seen anything like a smile on her face. Wrench gives her a small nod of approval.

_Problem?_ Wrench asks him.

Really, he’s thinking that it’s sad that this kid’s life has been such shit that two squishy, warmed-over burgers and a $5.99 dress made in a Chinese sweatshop are enough to make her day. He’s thinking that whatever’s waiting for them in El Paso isn’t going to be good. He’s thinking that his partner, the big bad assassin, is the most adorable person he’s ever met.

_No problem,_ Numbers replies. _Looks good on her,_ and if the cashier thinks it questionable that two men are buying several rolls of duct tape, a box of ammunition, and a little girl’s sundress, well, she doesn’t get paid enough to ask.

* * *

There’s a giant pistachio off Highway 54, rising up against the sky like an alien egg about to spew forth a glistening monstrosity. So of course Wrench gets all excited and pulls over to have a better look, and Numbers slouches against the hood of the car, the sun warm on his bare arms, taking in the spectacle of an adult man who kills people for a living losing his shit over a massive nut.

Olivia runs up to the white wooden fence and braces her hands on it; the gates are open, but she stops at the barrier as if it’s barbed wire and flak towers. This far, and no further. Wrench leans against the car beside him, close enough that Numbers can feel the tickle of the little hairs on his arm, but this last distance, too, can’t be crossed.

_We should keep moving,_ Numbers signs. Wrench is watching the girl with an expression that can only be described as wistful, and Numbers wants to shake him hard and remind him that the kid was right, that nothing good happens to people like her, to people like them, that their orbits do not overlap with worlds that contain a child’s laughter or ridiculous roadside attractions. They’re dropping her home, that’s it, and then it’s on to Tucson where they know another guy who, if they’re very fucking lucky, might take the coke at a decent price and not ask a lot of questions.

He doesn’t need to, though, because there’s only so long you can look at a giant pistachio—no matter how cool Wrench clearly thinks it is—and Olivia shuffles back to the car, kicking up dust with her sneakers. She looks up at them both, and Numbers gets a worrying premonition that she wants to hug them.

Instead, she just signs, _thank you,_ exaggerating the motion so much that it practically turns into a little bow. Wrench, never exactly known for his manners, signs back, _welcome,_ and Numbers is left wondering why here, why now, when she’s still an hour or more from home, when they could still change their minds and bury her in the desert with no one ever the wiser?

Wrench puts a hand on the girl’s shoulder and guides her back into the car.

* * *

“You can park here,” Olivia says, then adds, “Wait. How much do you like your car?” 

They should probably get a new car, Numbers thinks, and dye jobs, and maybe he should—much as he shudders at the very thought—shave off his beard, but at the very least, if the car’s trashed and tagged, it’s better than nothing. He shrugs. 

She stands blinking in the bright sunlight. Hesitates a moment, then reaches out her little hand for Wrench to take. Her other hand is wrapped around the handle of the plastic Walmart bag.

“Come with me?” she asks, and Wrench is nodding even before Numbers signs it out. He walks behind the two of them, braced to reach for his gun, as she leads them through the parched streets and corrugated metal warehouses and bright murals of farmers and guerrillas and the Virgin Mary. She opens a tall steel gate and, tugging Wrench after her, heads down a narrow passageway between two whitewashed buildings. Numbers traces a finger over the cracking paint. A German Shepherd behind a rusted chain link fence barks as they pass by. 

The door is open; she nudges it open and walks into darkness. There’s a bed sheet tacked up over the apartment’s sole, barred window. His shoes crunch chip bags and moldy takeout containers strewn across the carpet. Numbers tells himself that he’s lived in worse places, but that’s before he sees the woman on the stained beige sofa, head lolling against the wall, her mouth, crusted with sores, opened to expose blackened teeth like a rotting fencepost.

“ _Hola mamá_ ,” Olivia says softly, but if the woman notices, she doesn’t show it. The girl finally releases Wrench’s hand and sits on the sofa, shaking her mother. The woman groans and mumbles something before her heavy eyelids slide shut.

Wrench lifts a Ziploc bag off the coffee table and sniffs at the contents. He knew, Numbers thinks, he knew the whole time it was going to be something like this, and that’s why he kept making stops along the way, why he dragged the trip out as long as he could. _Let’s go._

Olivia sits stiffly on the couch, and Wrench refuses to break eye contact with her. He takes out the pad and writes, _Do you have somewhere else to go?_

The girl scoffs. “Who do you think gave me to Morales?”

_Going back to him?_

She doesn’t answer. Brushing past the two men, she steps back outside, to the dismay of the dog. Wrench goes after her and Numbers signs, _Walk away,_ before grabbing his arm.

Wrench tugs his arm free with enough force to knock Numbers off balance. He staggers into the doorframe, his back protesting the sudden movement. He sags against the door and takes a few long breaths, pushing the pain down, and stalks after his idiot partner.

He catches up with Wrench and Olivia just as a boy a few years older than her rolls up on a bike and shouts something in Spanish. He hears “ _murió_ ” and the girl’s already running, stumbling over cracked pavement. Wrench draws his gun and follows, and so Numbers has to go after him, tracking the two kids through the dilapidated housing project. 

He smells copper in the air before he sees the first corpse, face down on the cement in front of a house with blood pooling from the crushed pulp of his skull. There’s another one slumped in the doorway, his hand on a pistol he never had a chance to fire. The kids stand in the walkway, the boy a yard back, Olivia a little closer. Wrench moves her behind him and, gun raised, kicks the door the rest of the way open.

Numbers knows before he looks inside that there’s nothing breathing in there. Three more corpses in the front hallway, none of them older than 20. Past the kitchen, a man about his own age, flies already buzzing over the deep gashes across his face, is nailed to the back door. If he were a betting man, he’d put money on this being Morales.

The dead man is dressed in a thin wife-beater that’s more rust-brown than white now. The hole between his eyes is what finally killed him, but he’d suffered first. Through the slashes in the shirt, stiff with dried blood, Numbers makes out the word _THIEF_ carved into his chest.

“Your guys must have thought he was behind the shootout,” Olivia says from behind him, her voice too flat for it to be an accusation. He turns to see the girl standing in the square of light from the kitchen window, still clutching the plastic bag with the stupid dress in it. He’s pieced it together already. They all have. The rest of the Albuquerque crew would have discovered the bodies by now, assumed Morales’s gang had ambushed them, and headed south faster than Wrench and Numbers had driven to take it out in blood. Fuck knows what Morales had told them before he’d died, but it obviously hadn’t made them very happy.

They wouldn’t have found the money or the drugs or even their little courier. Reinhardt, who runs the operation, doesn’t strike him as a man comfortable with uncertainty. Nor is he stupid; he’ll take one look at the bodies and know who is missing.

_We need to go,_ he signs at Wrench, who for once doesn’t argue with him. Shoving the girl ahead of him, he weaves his way through the corpses as the sirens he can’t hear wail louder and louder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Roadside America describes the Alamogordo giant pistachio as: "30 feet tall, and painted in bright colors not seen in other giant nuts."
> 
> http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/19939


	5. Smoke Signals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phone calls are made and arguments had, but communication's not anyone's strong suit.

Olivia makes it almost to the car before she collapses to her knees, retching. Wrench grabs her arms and hauls her behind a house. Numbers stands guard, his eyes on the street, while his partner smoothes her hair back from her face and dodges a spray of ex-hamburger. 

The girl wipes her mouth on her sleeve—yeah, there is definitely a reason he’s never spent much time with kids—and flings her arms around a startled Wrench, burying her face against his chest. Numbers can hear her sobbing, and Wrench folds her into his arms as though rescuing and comforting small children is something he does all the time.

Numbers jerks his head in the direction of the car and Wrench looks offended.

_What?_

Wrench glares and adjusts his grip on the girl. 

 _Cops are coming,_ Numbers signs out, exaggerating every gesture. Wrench usually has a sixth sense for police sirens, like the deaf guy equivalent of sonar or something, but his attention’s focused entirely on the kid. Grudgingly, he climbs to his feet, the girl’s arms clamped around his neck. _We’re not taking her,_ Numbers tells him.

Wrench pretends he doesn’t see and starts walking, Numbers trailing behind him and aggressively waving his hands in words that fail to slow their target in any discernable way. Wrench puts the girl in the back seat—she curls up with her knees tucked against her chest, weeping—and slams the door.

 _Not our problem,_ Numbers signs.

Wrench throws his hands up in an exasperated twitch that Numbers is pretty sure his partner picked up from him. _You said you didn’t want to kill a kid._

_I don’t._

_Leaving her is the same as killing._

Numbers is convinced that there is an entire spectrum of ethical gradation between shooting a child and burdening themselves with the responsibility of her continued survival, particularly when their own grip on life is so precarious. And as much as she’s grafted onto Wrench like a limpet—which, _fuck,_ he sympathizes with that, he has those days too—his partner doesn’t have any more clue how to look after a kid than he does.

He’s just not sure he can get all that across before the cops—or Reinhardt’s guys—are on top of them.

 _Fuck it._ He climbs into the passenger seat, slamming the door in an entirely pointless pique. They can talk about it on the way. Maybe they can find an orphanage to drop her off at. Are there still orphanages? He decides that there must be, and that Wrench clearly grew up in one, and possibly it was run by serial killers or Satanic cultists and actually, that explains a lot about Wrench, come to think of it.

Olivia lifts up her head; he can just see her eyes in the rearview mirror. She’s been crying, though he’s relieved to see there’s no obvious puke on her face. Bored of his standoff with Wrench, he glares at her instead.

“Where are you going now?” she asks. She sounds exhausted. He doesn’t remember the first dead body he saw, but he doubts it happened under any better circumstances than Morales, and he doubts he was any older than she is.

Still, she’s had a rough 24 hours. He shakes his head.

“I wanna come with you guys.”

He grabs the notepad and scrawls, _No place for a kid._

“They’ll kill me.”

Numbers shrugs.

“Please,” she says, quiet and sad, and he turns to look out the window—the one safe place left to look, at the dry, dun flatlands dotted with skeletal bushes—pretending, to no use, that he’s somehow missed what she’s said.

They drive for at least an hour like that. When three long-haul trucks in a row pass them, the only traffic for miles, Wrench apparently deems it safe to pull off to the side of the road and stalk across the desert with the kind of grim determination he moves with when he has a target to kill. Numbers hesitates, then makes a clear, _stay the fuck in the car or I’ll fucking shoot you_ gesture that even someone who’s never _heard_ of ASL would understand.

When he reaches Wrench, his partner whirls on him with a silent fury that he, ironically, seems to reserve for the people he actually likes.

 _You can’t do this,_ Numbers signs. He must know, there’s no way he doesn’t know. Whatever people assume about him, Wrench is far from stupid, and like any competent criminal, he’s always weighing the sentence against the payoff.  But he just stands there, arms crossed over his chest, convinced that if he’s patient enough, Numbers will just give up and let him win. _It’s illegal, for starters._

_Never stopped you before._

It’s been a long time since Numbers has had the urge to strangle his partner—though really, he has a slightly less of a chance of winning a physical fight than an argument, which is to say no chance at all. He stares down at his shoes, the leather polish long ruined in the dust, then back up at Wrench.

 _Is it the hooker thing?_ Numbers asks. Wrench scowls, but Numbers doubts there’s a tactful way of asking in English, let along ASL.

He shakes his head. _Wasn’t like that. No one forced me._

Numbers doubts that’s the case, and he’d been so young back then, hardly older than she is now, but no, he doesn’t see himself in the girl, that’s not what it is. What the fuck is wrong with him? As far as Numbers is concerned, the sole advantage of being queer as a three dollar bill in a world that hates your fucking guts is that you’re free of the whole family bullshit. He can understand why Wrench rescued the kid, but he can’t figure out why he’d want to let her tag along.

 _You want to do something good,_ Wrench tells him.

He does, or at least he did last night, when he was lying in Wrench’s arms feeling loved and safe. Now, the unforgiving heat of the desert bearing down on him and fuck knows what up their asses looking for the drugs and the money and the kid, he’s not so sure. Wrench takes his momentary falter for more than it is, and bridges the last bit of distance between them, leaving no space for communication between them but the physical.

Wrench tilts his chin up, strokes the side of his face, and Numbers’ whole world is swallowed up in those stupid big green eyes. Fuck dammit, Wrench wants to settle down on some fucking Thomas Kinkade kitschy farmhouse and raise the goddamned kid as his own, doesn’t he?

He draws back—harder than it sounds—to give himself enough distance to sign, _I could buy you a puppy instead._

Wrench snorts.

_A fucked-up pathetic puppy only you could love. With one eye and three legs._

_You hate dogs._

_I hate kids more._ Something clicks, and he wishes it hadn’t. _Who does she remind you of?_

Wrench is watching the car. The girl still hasn’t moved, her face pressed up against the glass like she’s staring at a toy her parents can’t afford. He shifts his stance, kicking up more dust, and for just a split second, lets his armor drop.

 _My first translator,_ he replies, and, decisions made, turns back to the road.

* * *

The wheels of the law, even greased, move by increments, but by 10 pm, Special Agent Pete Hutchinson is ankle deep in a goddamned massacre, gagging on the acrid stench of blood and piss. He picks his way through an obstacle course of dead scumbags until he reaches the last guy—crucified to a door, goddamned savages—and a modicum of privacy. 

The phone rings. It’s the burner, not his work phone, so he knows right away who’s calling.

“I take it _this_ —” He pauses, though Reinhardt can’t actually see the congealing pool of blood by his feet. “—is your work?”

“I’m 270 miles away. How’s it look?”

“A fucking mess. I’m at the scene now. Can’t talk.”

“Then listen.” It’s a bad connection, and Reinhardt’s pissed, which doesn’t make him any easier to understand. Hutchinson catches something about a shootout, and his crew getting stiffed, and several racial epithets and inferences regarding the dead man’s immigration status. He holds the phone away from his ear and lets Reinhardt vent.

“You should be more careful.” He side-eyes the dead guy. “This the culprit?”

He hears the sound of a match being struck on the other end of the line, a sharp inhale. “No,” Reinhardt says finally.

“No? So this was what, just…?”

“Questioning. Claimed he didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“And you believe him?”

There’s a long pause. “In my experience,” Reinhardt says finally, “men don’t lie much when you put a Taser to their balls.”

“You’re a fuckin’ peach. You need me to dig?”

“I know who it was. Coupla shitbirds used to work for me. Need to borrow your database.”

Like he gives the fucking orders. The shit Hutchinson’s got on him, he could go away for several lifetimes. “Since when’re you in charge?”

“If I’m right,” Reinhardt says, “there’s a high profile bust in it for you.” And money, but he doesn’t need to say that. There are damn good reasons why Reinhardt’s not behind bars.

Hutchinson sighs. “Give me the names.”

Another inhale and exhale. “Oh,” Reinhardt says. “You do not know the shit you just stepped in.”

“So tell me.”

“These aren’t the kind of guys who _have_ names.”

So mafia if he’s lucky, Los Zetas if he isn’t. Either way, he has the unsettling sense that these are only the first bodies to drop.

He hears his own name being called. They’ve found something in the front hallway. “Gotta go. I don’t want a war, you hear?”

He hears Reinhardt laugh, bitter and dark. “Oh,” he says. “Who does?”

* * *

 _I’m ditching you the first chance I get,_ Numbers signs at the girl. It’s lost on her, of course, but if they’re going to do this, he’s determined to be a dick about it every step of the way. And cute though she might be, he has no intention of dying for her, or worse, letting Wrench die for her. 

And when the fuck did Wrench ever have another translator? He’d been all alone in the world when Numbers met him, sucking strangers’ cocks in truck stops until he’d inadvertently drawn the syndicate’s attention.

“I have no idea what you just said,” Olivia says.

He signs, _Brat,_ then fingerspells it very slowly to ensure that she understands. Wrench, catching the movement of his hands, tries, and fails, to hide a small grin. It’s been so long since he’s smiled that if he’d resorted to that in the first place, Numbers would have just given him anything he wanted.

He’s not quite so petty a man as to remind Wrench that the last time they’d given someone the benefit of the doubt, they’d both nearly died, but he’s sure as fuck thinking it. He turns on the radio, flipping between static bursts for news, for distraction from the nagging fear that’s plagued him for longer than he’d like to admit. For confirmation that it’s justified. He sneaks glances at his partner, searching his stony features for a clue as to what he’s not saying. 

It’s just _wrong._ He’s never been told Wrench’s real name, but beyond that, his partner doesn’t keep secrets. He doesn’t _have_ secrets. Not from Numbers, anyway.

“I can help you,” Olivia tells him.

He grunts, the closest he gets these days to the satisfaction of telling anyone to go fuck themselves.

“I can! You, um—” She makes a throat-slitting gesture and immediately goes contrite. _Yeah, kid, you’d better be. I’ve strangled people for less._ “Sorry. But that’s new, right?”

Fresh enough that when he wakes up in the middle of the night, he forgets that he can’t scream, but he’ll be fucked if _she_ gets to know that. He nods.

“You used to talk for him before. I could. I mean.”

He looks at Wrench, whose eyes are fixed on the road. Is it that stupidly simple? Wrench just wants a new translator, because that’s one more thing Numbers can’t do for him anymore?

He tells himself it’s just a few more hours. They’ll find somewhere to lose the kid, the karmic slate will be wiped—well, not anywhere near clean, but that tiny bit less bloody—and he can get back to lying low and salvaging the pieces of his life. In the meantime, he can toss her a few bucks and get her to buy supplies at the next truck stop.

 _Practice,_ he spells out, and she nods eagerly. He settles in his seat and signs, _S-C-R-U…_

* * *

The sun’s low in the sky, sinking the mountains into shards of indigo and glimmering red. The place they’ve stopped is nowhere near all that, just some shitty parking lot in the middle of South Tucson with a porta-potty and a few rusted cars that look like they’ve been there for centuries. It’s also the site of one of the last payphones in the city, and Mr. Wrench and Mr. Numbers, sitting in the front of the stopped car, exchange silent glances.

Olivia’s already realized that they aren’t going to kill her; now she knows for sure that she’s actually useful to them.

“This guy,” she says, into the cool silence. “How exactly were you planning on contacting him?”

They’re a lot of things, her kidnappers-slash-rescuers, but they’re not drug fiends. They haven’t opened the trunk since the coke went in there. Her best guess is that they want to unload it as quickly as possible and move on to wherever they were headed when all this went down, and they can’t do that because neither of them can use a telephone.

The understanding of just how very little they planned this thing creeps up on her all at once. They’d stolen the drugs and the money and they’d run, with her in tow, and it actually hadn’t occurred to them that once they were in Tucson, they had no way of reaching the guy they were looking for.

Numbers digs into his pocket and retrieves a few quarters out of a beat-up wallet. He writes out a number on one of the diminishing grey sheets of hotel notepad paper. He signs—and she sounds out— _Tell him Fargo is here._

“Fargo,” she says. “Like the city?”

_Package for him._

“What’s his name?” Olivia asks, and Numbers shakes his head, a wordless, _don’t ask._ A bad man, but she’s known nothing but bad men in her life and she’s hiding behind two of them now. She slides out of the car and crosses the pavement—certain that at any moment, a gunman will emerge from behind the shadowed buildings across the street, from underneath the old cars—to the payphone.

The second she hears a groggy, “Yeah?”, she blurts, “Fargoisherewithapackageforyou,” and she’s not sure what she’s expecting, but it’s not the near-hysterical laughter that bubbles through the receiver.

“Fuck off,” the man says, the dial tone cutting in to the last syllable.

Her eyes flicker back to the car. Her life depends on this phone call. Every time she blinks, she sees Morales nailed to the door. She didn’t even _like_ Morales, but he’s dead, his men are dead, and the only thing between her and the guys who killed them is the two men in the car. She drops in the second coin.

“Fargo is dead,” the voice on the other end says. “I don’t know who you are, but—”

“That’s what they said to say.” Her words twist into a squeak, the breath high in her chest.

“Address,” he barks. She glances at the street sign at the intersection and tells him. His voice, when he speaks again, is lower, almost quavering. “Three hours. You’d better not be fucking with me.”

“I’m not,” she says hurriedly, “I promise I’m not,” but he’s already hung up and she’s standing in the darkened parking lot between a strange city and two killers who aren’t any good at all at crime but somehow make the voices of drug dealers tremble.

She somehow finds the strength to make it back to the car and tells Numbers what the man said. “What do we do now?”

 _Wait,_ he signs, then, _job is mostly waiting._

“Don’t you get bored?” she asks. “What do you do?”

He rolls his eyes and turns forward in his seat again, and both of them go back to ignoring her.

It’s closer to five hours before the lights of their contact’s car flash through the heavy black night. And when he steps out of the door, he’s not alone.

* * *

Another phone call: 

“Got something for me?”

“You won’t like it.”

Reinhardt knows what the score is. He’s already made preparations to leave. “That so?”

“For a coupla guys with no names, they sure as fuck set off a lot of alarm bells. You’ve got incoming, by the way. Two FBI agents from Fargo.” He hears the squeak of Hutchinson’s leather office chair. “You don’t sound surprised.”

“I need you to deal with them.”

“From the looks of it, I won’t have to. These assholes each have a rap sheet as long as my dick. Now _I_ want the collar, not the feds, so—”

“You fuckin’ stupid or something? The fucking hired muscle did not just shoot three of my men for shits and giggles. These boys are connected. I want to know what their game is before the FBI gets their grubby little hands on them.”

“There’s one more thing. CI in South Tucson gave us a call. Small-time shitbag, mentioned Fargo too.”

“Of course he did.” Fucking Fargo. The syndicate had its fingers in a lot of pies before the _unpleasantness_ went down last year; the last thing Reinhardt needs is a new-old player with an unknown agenda on the scene. Fuck, fuck, fuck, but the careful relationship he’s built with the Albuquerque DEA won’t be much good if the syndicate’s not as dead as he’d thought and the FBI’s sniffing at his heels. He shrugs on his jacket and tucks his gun into his waistband. “I’m on my way,” he says. “You know what to do.”


	6. The Bottle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "An assassin, a cute kid, and a corrupt DEA agent, Numbers signs. No thanks, I’ve seen how “The Professional” ends."

“So there’s this poor man who buys a bottle off a sad old rich guy in Hawaii for $10.”

Webb Pepper is only half-listening to his partner. He’s got tuning in and out of Budge’s ramblings down to a science, nodding and saying, “Yeah?”—and occasionally, “You talk a lotta shit, Bill”—in all the appropriate places.

“Are they making these things smaller and smaller or what?” Budge shifts his long legs, bent up against the back of the economy-class seat in front of him. Pepper’s happy enough to be out of the basement, but the Bureau couldn’t spring for business?

“Sad like his best friend died?” Pepper asks, muffling a yawn with his fist. Hawaii sounds real nice right about now. Best suggestion Budge has had in months, even if he didn’t mean to make it. “Or sad like there’s not enough dip for his chips but if he adds more dip, there won’t be enough chips for his dip?”

Budge sighs the most melodramatic sigh ever issued from human lips. “The rich guy says that there’s an imp that lives in the bottle that will grant the buyer his heart’s every desire. _But_. If he’s still holding onto the thing when he dies, he’ll burn in hell for all eternity. The only way to evade the curse is if he sells it, for cash, for less than he bought it for. Still, the poor guy’s flat broke so what’s he got to lose? He buys the bottle and wishes for his money back, and his pockets immediately fill with coins. He keeps wishing, and he gets everything he asks for.”

“What’s he wish for?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Sure it does. Is he the kind of guy who wishes for world peace and a cure for cancer, or is he the kind of guy who wishes for infinite wishes? Or a dragon?”

“He already has infinite wishes. At least from his perspective.” Budge runs a thumb over his goatee. “Love, money, I guess. The usual stuff.”

“Boring,” Pepper says. He would wish for a dragon. Well, he’d wish for his professional reputation back first, but he’d wish for a dragon second.

“Not if you don’t got it. Anyway. When he’s a very old man, he realizes that he needs to sell the bottle or be doomed to hell. He sells it to a friend for $5, and it’s all good until his wife gets sick, and the only way to save her life is to buy it back at even less. But then _she_ finds out what he’s done, so she bribes a man to buy it from her for $1 with the understanding that she’ll buy it back for 50 cents. So then he does the same thing, bribes a guy to buy it for 25 cents, and so on. The cheaper it gets, the harder it’s gonna be to sell, and the less time they have.”

Pepper sits up, watches the brown crinkles of mountain below from the plane’s small window. “Can he lie about the curse to get someone to buy it?”

“Nope.” 

“Damn.”

“So who’s the unlucky bastard who’s willing to buy it for a penny?”

Pepper says nothing. He doesn’t have time for Budge’s stupid riddles, not today, not when they’re so close to being out of cold storage for good. He looks down at the folder in his hand and opens it up to the first page, where a gritty surveillance photo pulled from a convenience store outside of Tucson is paper-clipped to the case file. It’s as blurry as they all are—makes him wonder why the owners bother with cameras at all—but to two FBI agents who’ve spent six months parked outside the same nondescript office building and goddamned Chinese restaurant, the guys in the photo, standing in a lineup to the cash behind a little girl, are unmistakable.

Budge is looking at the photo too. “You’re a long way from home,” he says quietly. “Whatcha doing out here?” 

“Hiding from us?” Pepper suggests. That can’t be it; after the initial investigation had gone nowhere and some small town cop out of Bemidji took down the man apparently responsible for the Fargo massacre, interest in the case they’d spent months building dropped just as dead as the 22 men in the office building. The Duluth PD had launched a half-hearted manhunt for the two gunmen who’d escaped from the hospital, but they’d evaporated and Budge and Pepper were left once again holding their own dicks in the filing room. If his paycheck didn’t still come in every two weeks, he’d think they’d been completely forgotten.

Then, seven months later, the only two known survivors of the Fargo syndicate had popped up on the DEA’s radar with a trail of corpses in their wake. Any way he looks at it, it doesn’t make any sense, unless Fargo’s tentacles extend much farther than previously thought. 

Bill Budge, crazy bastard that he is, probably knows him better than his own wife does. But there are some things you don’t tell your partner, and that part of him that hopes for a chance to redeem his career—even if that redemption comes with a body count—is one of them. All these months, Budge has been convinced it’s all just temporary, that the Bureau will see the light and absolve them, but Pepper knows better. If they’re ever going to be able to hold their heads up high again, they’ll pay a price for it in blood.

“So what’s the answer?” Pepper asks. “To the bottle thing. It’s a riddle, right?”

“No answer,” Budge says, distractedly.

“Maybe I don’t believe in hell,” Pepper says. “Or genies. Maybe I just want a nice souvenir from Hawaii on my window ledge for a penny.”

“Maybe,” Budge replies. He looks down at the file again. “Don’t you go anywhere,” he says. “We’re coming for ya.”

* * *

Olivia won’t stop fidgeting in the backseat. She’s quiet, but she’s not silent, and of course Wrench has no clue, so Numbers signs, _I told you it was a bad idea to bring her with,_ and points backwards.

Wrench doesn’t even bother to look. _He’s not coming,_ he signs back, but if he actually believed that, they’d be hours away, holed up in some motel, plotting out some other place to unload the drugs. Numbers straightens in his seat, trying to ignore the twinge in his back, to not think about what the girl had said about the phone call.

_Fargo is dead._ It shouldn’t hit him as hard as it does, not after all these months, not even at all. He should be happy. He’s free, insofar as any man is ever free from his family.

It would be different, he decides, if he’d watched them die himself. There’s finality in watching the light go out of someone’s eyes, whether you wanted them dead or not. As it is, he’s still looking over his shoulder, still waiting for the phone to ring (though it wouldn’t even if someone else had miraculously survived; three months after Duluth, when it became clear his wounded throat would never manage more than grunts and rattling breathy noises, he’d let his plan expire, and a month after that, he’d had the wherewithal to throw the cell out for good). He knows the head office guys are all dead but there were no funerals, or, if there was, he never got the invite.

He checks his watch for the hundredth time. Wrench sees the flash of headlights before he does and taps the back of his hand.

“Is that—” Olivia starts.

The other car stops a few yards away. First one man, then another, steps out in front of the glaring white.

_Did he say he was bringing friends?_ Wrench signs. He checks his gun and opens the car door. 

_Stay here,_ Numbers spells out at Olivia—he doesn’t look back to see if she’s understood it—and gets out of the car as well. He can’t get a good look at the man, an old supplier who’d moved out of state when the cops were getting uncomfortably close. There are more shapes inside the car. _I count four,_ he signs at Wrench. His partner nods. He doesn’t like this either. Communication’s been a problem between them lately, but the threat of an ambush has somehow jolted them back into perfect sync.

_Ready?_ Wrench signs, and just like that, Numbers feels like himself again.

The driver kills the headlights, plunging the car lot into darkness. He has a moment of disorientation—worse for Wrench, he thinks, who’s suddenly blind _and_ deaf—before the gunfire snaps him into high alert. He drops to the ground, squinting at the sparks flying overhead until the shadows solidify into shapes.

His finger squeezes the trigger, and the crushing dread he’s carried for so very long erupts outwards through the barrel of his gun in a flash of heat. He’s shooting blind but this is familiar territory, and he has the advantage, the sound and light from four guns more perceptible than from two. As long as Wrench is still firing beside him, as long as he can still see the dim outline of his partner’s cowboy boots under the car, he’s winning.

It’s a fuck of a lot easier than negotiating, anyway, and a fuck of a lot more _fun_. 

By the time his eyes have adjusted, there’s nothing moving beside the other car. He climbs to his feet, brushing gravel off his knees. If these fucks aren’t already thoroughly dead, he’s going to kill them for fucking up his pants on top of everything else. 

He staggers, still half-dazed, towards the other side of the lot, but he’s only made it two steps before Wrench catches him up in his arms. His partner’s huge hands are all over him, fingertips dragging over his face, the back of his skull, across his chest. He jerks away, annoyed, and signs, _I’m fine._ Then, as if the possibility of one of their attackers remaining alive and armed doesn’t even exist, he mirrors the movement of Wrench’s hands, exhaling only when he finds no injuries, nothing but the solid warmth of his partner’s body, the steady beat of his heart, beneath his palms. 

It takes him another second to remember the kid. She hasn’t cried out or anything, though, so either she’s okay or she died fast. He’s almost convinced that the former is better.

It’s only then that the fear returns, the reminder that he could have lost Wrench just now over something so stupid as a bad drug deal in a parking lot in the ass-end of a dying town. He’s always known how it is; you let yourself love something and it consumes you, destroys you, leaves you weak and shivering and desperate in the dark once it’s gone. He was right to keep his distance all those years, but it’s too late now. He’s had a glimmer of what his life would be like without Wrench in it, and the terror at that prospect is all but paralyzing.   

One of the guys—now that he can see clearly—is still breathing, crawling around on the ground and gasping blood into the pavement. He cocks his head at Wrench, who hauls the man into a half-slump against the front tire. There’s a patch of blood on his jeans and another spreading over his side.

Wrench looks at Numbers expectantly, because they’ve done this before, a hundred times, a thousand, except that was all _before_ , and they both realize it at once.

_Shit._

Numbers thinks about it for a minute, rubbing absentmindedly at his scarred, useless throat. _Bring him to the car._

* * *

Olivia’s cowering in the space between the front and back seats when the shooting stops. She can hear a man’s screaming, and though she tells herself that it can’t be a guy with no larynx and it’s not deep enough to be what Wrench’s voice would probably sound like if he ever used it, but she still tries to burrow deeper when the back door opens. 

Numbers gestures for her to come closer. Outside, she can see Wrench dragging the screaming man across the concrete by his armpits. She shivers and shakes her head. 

Numbers points at her and spells out, _Help._

There’s glass all over the seat; all of the car windows are blown out, and abstractly, as if the blood and terror belonged entirely to someone else, she notes the scratches over her hands and forearms, turned to black streaks in the darkness. They don’t hurt until she moves, and even then, it’s a persistent itch more than real pain. Through the shattered window, she can see spent shell casings and, farther away, dark humps that can only be bodies. She’s never seen even a single corpse up close before yesterday, but she’s making up for it by seeing a lot of them now. 

Somewhere, she can hear the sound of a car engine revving, a police siren, but it’s very far away, and no comfort.

“I’m scared,” Olivia says, her voice tiny.

Numbers reaches out his hand, palm up. It’s a normal looking hand, she thinks, not clawed or dripping with blood, though he’s just slaughtered three people. The black line of a tattoo starts at his wrist and disappears under his sleeve.

She places her shaking hand in his, and he pulls her out of the car. Wrench is crouched down beside the injured man, his gun still at the ready.

Numbers makes the sign for _speak._ That one, she recognizes, and nods. Then he spells out a sentence and her lips sound out each letter.

“Who sent you?” Olivia asks the man, her voice rising to nearly shrill.

He laughs, more blood bubbling from his mouth. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Numbers prods her, and she asks again. “What the fuck is this? Who are you people?”

In a blur of movement almost too fast to see, Wrench punches him in the jaw. He screams again, twitches and spits out a tooth.

“I don’t know nothin’,” he chokes out, the blood thickening his speech into a slur. “Told me to show up, so I did.”

“Who told you to show up?” Olivia parrots. She frowns at the sequence of letters Numbers spells next, then manages, “Reinhardt?”

“I don’t know what you’re fucking talking about,” the man says. “Why do you have a kid with you?”

Wrench pummels him again. Morales died like this, she thinks, some guy he didn’t even know beating the shit out of him until he gave up what he knew, or didn’t. She snaps her head away; she can’t look anymore even if he was shooting at her five minutes ago, and the man isn’t any closer to talking no matter how much Wrench tortures him. 

“Maybe he really doesn’t know,” she says to Numbers, and flinches at the flash in his eyes. He catches her wrist and drags her hand across the front of the man’s shirt, streaking her blood across the white fabric, then releases her abruptly. 

“What the _fuck_?” he splutters.

Numbers waves her away and writes something down on the notepad. She can’t see it from this angle—and she really, really doesn’t want to look at this grotesque little tableau at all— but when he shows it to the man, his eyes widen.

Numbers blinks, stands back, his arms crossed. Wrench, whose fist was raised to strike again, pulls away as well. As he tucks the notepad back in his jacket, she catches most of the writing on it. 

_Blood from a missing kid on your shirt. Which you’ll be wearing when we dump your unconscious body at the cop shop. Know what they do to child-killers in prison? :-)_ The smiley face is all the more disturbing for the matching one on Numbers’ lips.

“I don’t know who this Reinhardt asshole is,” the man says finally. “Word is your buddy there—” He jerks his head at one of the corpses, presumably the guy they were supposed to meet. “—has a friend in the DEA. There’s an _understanding_. You’re—” He coughs, more blood issuing from his mouth. “You’re the ones who ripped off the crew in Albuquerque. You just made yourselves a fuckton of enemies.” 

Numbers prods her, signs again. “Name,” she says. “Uh. Of the DEA agent?”

“Never met the guy.”

Wrench slams a fist into his wounded side and he shrieks, “I don’t, I, _fuck,_ I told you _everything I know_.”

Wrench raises an eyebrow. Numbers shrugs. She sees the flash of Wrench’s gun.

“Hey, you’re not gonna—”

She feels the crack of the gunshot reverberate through her body, and doesn’t quite turn in time to miss the spray of blood. Numbers pulls her around and kneels in front of her so she doesn’t see the man gasp his last. She’s staring right into his eyes—which she’d thought were almost kind, back when he was teaching her sign language in the car, and are now as flat and dead as a shark’s—close enough that she can smell the fruity shampoo from the hotel that seems so incongruous on him now.

“You didn’t have to kill him,” she says.

He signs, very slowly, _We don’t leave witnesses._

She thinks better of asking if he considers _her_ a witness. Instead, she tells him, “I’m not a missing kid. No one’s looking for me.”

She thinks she owes the dead man a last backwards glance before she shuts herself back in the car, that it’s cowardly to look away from the pool of blood spreading beneath his body, at this man who’s dead, if indirectly, because of her. But she’s not that strong, and she shuts her eyes until they’re on the highway again, driving into the night.

* * *

Wrench has his switchblade out and is stabbing it in the spaces between his splayed fingers at an ever-increasing speed, because he’s bored and slightly drunk and Numbers has never felt the need to mention that knives make him unsettled these days and he’d prefer it if they both stuck to just carrying guns. They’ve got a case of Bud between them and Olivia is watching him do the thing with the knife like it’s impressive rather than profoundly fucking obnoxious. 

“Can you teach me how to do that?” she asks.

Numbers translates this as: _She wants you to murder her and hide her body under the floorboards._ Wrench pauses long enough to flip him the finger.

_They won’t stop. They think we’ve fucked them over._

Wrench puts the knife down on the desk. Olivia immediately snatches it up and turns it over in her slashed-up hands, eyeing the dull gleam of the blade. They should probably take it away from her, Numbers thinks, and neither of them do, which is one reason among many that they are the very last people in the world who should ever be entrusted with the care and feeding of a child. And yet.

_We did fuck them over,_ Wrench points out, though he knows damn well what Numbers means. Guys like Reinhardt don’t like to be ripped off, sure, but they also don’t like to extend past their reach. Reinhardt’s operation is smallish, at least compared to the syndicate’s, and given what he knows about their past, he’d assume they had someone’s backing. _He can’t have connections everywhere,_ Wrench says, and Numbers realizes that he somehow missed the bit about the DEA being involved, so he fills him in on what their attacker said before Wrench blew his brains out.

He expects Wrench to—no, damned if he knows what’s going on in Wrench’s brain these days; maybe he was wrong to think that his partner made it out of Duluth in better shape than he did. He doesn’t wake up in a cold sweat from nightmares like Numbers does, but that just means that the nightmares don’t end.

_An assassin, a cute kid, and a corrupt DEA agent,_ Numbers signs. _No thanks, I’ve seen how “The Professional” ends._

Wrench smirks at that, all easy charm, and Numbers thinks, his gut clenching, that they had far too little time together. Fifteen years is longer than most marriages, sure, but most of that was spent with Numbers being a stupid shit about everything and Wrench trying to love him the best you can love someone so determined to keep you at arm’s length.

_I’m sorry,_ he thinks, but instead just signs, _We should do something about her hands._ Wrench looks down at the little girl holding his knife like it’s protection against the forces beating down their door. He scratches at a sideburn, gets up and kneels by one of the beds, digging around through the duffel bags until he finds antiseptic and gauze.

“I could be like you guys,” Olivia says, oblivious to the tension between them, pushing herself up on her elbows on the desk to make herself taller. “You needed me out there.”

Just as well Numbers can’t talk; he wouldn’t be able to control what comes out of his mouth. She’s just a kid, he tells himself, born into it like he was, with no conception of another kind of life. He can’t blame her, can’t even hate her properly.

_You want to kill?_ he fingerspells. He imagines that pretty much any kid—even one in the game—would puke at the sight of a corpse. He doubts most kids would follow it up by wanting to make more corpses. Wrench takes the switchblade from her and doesn’t put it well out of her reach like a normal person would. She lets him look over her hands for embedded glass, and to her credit, barely flinches at the sting of the antiseptic when he dabs at the cuts. Wrench has had enough practice patching up Numbers every time he gets in the way of something more psycho than they are that he’s pretty skilled at it, so it probably doesn’t even hurt that much.

“I want to live,” she replies, and she’s so goddamn young but the edge to her voice is sharp steel.

_Not safe._ He waves a hand at himself and Wrench. 

“Oh, like it’s gonna be _so much_ safer with drug dealers and the _DEA_ after me?” She winces as Wrench finds a particularly deep cut. They might overlook her, Numbers thinks, but no, probably not. They all saw what Reinhardt’s men did to her neighborhood; it’s naïve to think that they’d leave a stone unturned. 

And, he thinks with a measure of uneasiness, he and Wrench don’t have much of a choice. If they leave her and Reinhardt finds her, fuck knows what she’d tell him under torture. It’s take her with them—wherever they end up fleeing—or put a bullet in her brain, and apparently he _does_ have some limits.

“You’re the only people who ever gave a shit about me,” Olivia whispers. 

_I don’t,_ Numbers starts, and the kid shrugs and says, “Okay, but _he_ does.”

Wrench tapes the last bit of gauze over the back of her hand, and Numbers thinks he gives too much of a shit. The only way to live in their world is to care about nothing, and for the longest time, until a tired conversation on the way to Bemidji, he’d been sure that was the case. 

Wrench signs, _Sleep._

She stands her ground. “I can stay with you?” she demands.

Those big fucking eyes that will, when all is said and done, consign him to an early grave, turn and focus on Numbers, like Wrench is a kid begging to keep a stray kitten that followed him home. It’s his own neuroses that kept him from being the partner Wrench deserved, and fuck, maybe Wrench just has more compassion than Numbers is capable of absorbing, too big a heart for the kind of work he found himself in, but regardless, if he wants the kid to stay, she stays. He feels bad for the kid’s shitty life, but he’d be able to move past the guilt if it were just about that. He can’t move past the rest of it, the understanding that Wrench is all he has left in the world and he’s given his partner every reason to leave this grim shitshow behind. 

Wearily, he nods.

Olivia’s face lights up as though they’ve promised her something other than inevitable violent death. “Thanks,” she says, and ducks her head, skips off to the washroom to change out of her bloodstained clothes.

Wrench folds up the knife and reaches across the desk for Numbers’ hand. Numbers manages to narrowly avoid that kind of sentimental bullshit by swiping for his beer instead and draining it dry.

_You realize we need to kill Reinhardt now,_ he signs.

Wrench nods. _Just him,_ he signs. _One more, and then we’re out. Free._

_What about the DEA?_ , he might sign back, or, _we could never be free,_ but he doesn’t. He finally lets Wrench take his hand and they both collapse on the bed in a tangle of tired limbs, and he listens to his partner drift to sleep as he lies awake and plans a war.


	7. Warpath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone's got secrets but altogether too much machismo to confess any of them.

Hutchinson meets them at the airport.

“Oh shiiiit,” Budge hisses at his approach. “It’s goddamn Clint Eastwood.”

It’s an exaggeration, but not by much. Hutchinson has the cowboy swagger down pat, the square-jawed stubbly determination, and if he wasn’t wearing mirror shades—Pepper snickers to himself at this—he’d probably be squinting into the sun.

Even without departmental rivalries, Bill Budge—who had probably hot-boxed his way through college and who, no shitting, applied for a job as a federal agent for the _rigorous intellectual challenge_ —does not have an amazingly high opinion of the DEA, though his opinion of Hutchinson improves dramatically when the agent offers to buy breakfast.

“They’re all savages down here,” Hutchinson is saying, stuffing pancakes into his mouth. The man can put away a lot of pancakes. It’s kind of impressive. “Doesn’t take much to get ‘em at each other’s throats, and this heat wave doesn’t help any. My CIs tell me this one started over a small amount, and there’s already a double-digit body count.” 

“We don’t care about the drugs,” Budge blurts out.

Pepper kicks his foot under the table. “What my partner is trying to say—” Things go better when Budge lets him do the talking. It is, alas, quite clear that Budge is not going to let him do the talking. “Is that we respect the jurisdictional boundaries and interdepartmental dynamics at play here.”

“You get the collar for the cartels,” Budge says. “We get the syndicate boys.” 

“What he means,” Pepper translates, “is that Fargo ruined our lives.”

Hutchinson slides his glasses off and places them carefully on the table. He takes a sip of his coffee. “I often wonder,” he says, his voice low, conspiratorial. “Why we even bother.” 

“Because it’s our job?” Pepper offers, as though he’s humoring a small child, and Budge, simultaneously, “Because we get paid?”

“There’s been studies,” Hutchinson says. “If there is a War on Drugs, we’re losing it. Every small-time dope dealer we lock up for life, every pathetic shit junky we toss in the system instead of rehab, every fuckin’ border patrol, it doesn’t make less addicts or less crime or less drugs. It just feeds the cartels. We’re peacekeepers in the goddamn Balkans, keeping these thugs from finishing each other off like society’s not crumbling all around us. We know it don’t work but we keep doing it.”

“Why do _you_ do it?” Budge asks.

“Because it’s better than the alternative,” Hutchinson says. “There’s no victory, but there’s a peace to be kept, of sorts. A stalemate. You let go of that, you hand over the keys and admit defeat, and you let go of fuckin’ civilization itself.” He coughs into his sleeve. “And it’s a matter of principle. You see these shitbags? Broke-ass, desperate, with scabs all over their mouths? They’ll sell their mothers for a dime. It’s disgusting.”

“Okaaaay.” Pepper isn’t used to this level of candidness, not before noon anyway, and not from anyone other than his partner.

“We’ve come a very long way,” Budge says, and—with a few notable omissions; he can, it seems, turn on his internal censor when he needs to—tells the story. “The Fargo syndicate dealt drugs, yeah, but that was a small part of a very large operation. They dealt in power and influence. In murder for hire. And they were untouchable for decades, until one man put an end to it, all by himself.” He slides the folder across the table. “Except these two. They made it out.” 

“Bemidji PD got the guy, Malvo. He’s in prison now. Life with no chance of parole, like, ever. He’s got nothing to lose and nothing to gain.”

“Never talked,” Pepper says, which isn’t entirely true, but Budge doesn’t know and Hutchinson doesn’t need to know. “Hasn’t said a word.”

“We need to find out what these guys know,” Budge says. “I mean, they’re suspects in a dozen murders across three states and they need to be locked up for good, but—”

“—we need answers even more.” Pepper finishes for him. 

“Gentlemen,” Hutchinson drawls, “I believe we can help each other.”

* * *

Wrench wakes before dawn, the girl still fast asleep and his partner fitful beside him, close to surfacing. His lips move—Wrench doubts there’s any sound coming out of them, but he places a finger over them just in case. Numbers’ eyes snap open, glassy and bleary; he bares his teeth and his fingers clamp around Wrench’s wrist until his gaze focuses and his breathing evens. 

_You’ll wake her,_ Wrench signs, once his partner lets go of him. _Don’t._

Numbers rolls onto his side to face him. _You have an actual plan yet?_  

Wrench shifts closer. _This,_ he signs, and leans his forehead against Numbers’, strokes his hair and draws him into a lingering kiss. Numbers is into it for a second or two and then tugs away and gestures at the kid. 

_Sleeping,_ Wrench signs. He knows he’s coming off as clingy and Numbers usually hates that, but it’s been a fucker of a few days. _We’re quiet._

_How the fuck would you know?_ But Numbers doesn’t need more pretext; he wriggles closer, slides a hand under the covers to palm at Wrench’s dick through his boxers. Wrench is more careful than that. It’s always been far too easy to set him on edge, turn him from affectionate to snarling and aloof with the wrong touch, with too many or two few words. He runs a hand over Numbers’ side, digs his fingers into the stiff muscles of his back until he’s relaxed enough that Wrench can jerk him off without him getting weird. 

Okay, it’s weird anyway, with the kid sleeping right there in the next bed. Group homes and juvy made him pragmatic about getting off whenever and wherever he can, regardless of who’s around, but Numbers is generally more reticent. His eagerness is either an indication of Wrench’s spectacular sexual prowess and utter irresistibility or there’s something else going on with him, and as much as Wrench knows he’s an utter beast in the sack, he suspects it’s probably the latter.

Numbers comes first, which is unusual in itself, the orgasm a rough spasm along the length of his body that’s over almost before Wrench is aware it’s happening. There was a time when that would be it and he’d have rolled out of bed and left Wrench to his own devices. Instead, he ignores the mess and turns the full force of his attention on his partner, his beard soft against Wrench’s collarbone, left hand pumping furiously while his right tugs at Wrench’s hair. Wrench clings to Numbers, raking nails up and down his spine, and he must have made some kind of a sound because the next thing he knows, Numbers has a hand cupped around his chin, his fingertips pushing past his lips. He licks and sucks at them, thrusts his hips upwards, trapped between the weight of his partner’s body half draped over him, the—now very distant—worry that he’ll unwittingly make too much noise and wake the kid, and the dizzying vertigo of loving this idiot _so fucking much._ He’s so lost in it that there’s a delay between Numbers freezing and Wrench realizing that the amazing pressure on his cock has suddenly stopped for no good reason.

Numbers pulls his hand out of Wrench’s hair and snaps his fingers under his nose. 

_Tell me about your other translator_. He’s let go of Wrench’s cock—the little shit—but he’s still running his toes along Wrench’s leg, his body moved only far enough away that they can both move their hands to sign.

_Eat a dick,_ Wrench replies, and bats his hand towards more useful endeavors than talking. Numbers scowls and tries to pin him to the bed beneath the knot of duvet and sheets, which is kind of cute but also useless on multiple levels. It does have the unintended consequence of cutting off conversation, so Wrench lets him get his anger out for a few seconds and waits for him to give up. _None of your fucking business,_ he signs once his hands are free again. He sits up against the headboard. At least the frenzied horniness has passed—Numbers has managed to kill that dead, even if he doesn’t know the reason.

Numbers—his hair mussed with sleep and friction, and _God,_ he’s distracting like that, when he’s put zero effort into preening—looks almost betrayed. Wrench would tell him that there’s a difference between not sharing and not being able to fucking talk about it, _ever,_ except that his hands can’t find their way around the words, and Numbers was never one for talking about his feelings anyway.

There was a time when even the most meaningless conversations between them were a fucking miracle, that momentous leap from having no one who’d talk to him to spending all his time with someone who never shut up. He reminds himself that he can’t take it for granted. Wrench leans over, kisses the crease between his eyes, and relents a little. _I’m from Lubbock. Got people there._  

_Okay,_ Numbers signs, clearly unsatisfied, but it’s not like he can mine his own past for criminals unconnected in any way with Fargo. He’s still pissed, but not so much that he’ll expose himself by telling Wrench why.

They have that much in common, then. 

_Sell the coke, buy fake IDs. More guns. Make our stand against Reinhardt._ Wrench forgoes spelling out Reinhardt’s name in favor of “R+ASS HAT.” Numbers, bless his twisted little heart, doesn’t even need to ask for clarification. Wrench would _marry_ the psychotic bastard if he could. _Rent a place that’s less of a shithole in a good school district._

_In Texas? She’ll grow up to be an illiterate creationist with five kids and the same number of teeth._

Wrench pushes down the kneejerk instinct to get defensive about his home state. _We could all move to Austin and become hipsters._ He runs his knuckles over Numbers’ beard. _You’d fit right in._

_Don’t think I’m letting this drop,_ Numbers signs, and then ruins it by smirking. Fucking hell, there’s a part of him that wants to do this too. Wrench knows he’s wanted out for a long time, longer than he’s ever been willing to admit, even more so now with the panic attacks and the shakes that keep him from being the calculating, hyper-competent killer that he once was. Wrench could have happily gone on doing what they did forever, otherwise, but now he just wants to give his poor, fucked-up partner some peace. More than that; he’d give Numbers everything if he could, the entire fetid cesspool of his past and future, if it were the kind of world where such a thing were possible. 

At the very least, though, he can eliminate Reinhardt and anything else that comes after them, and make sure the remainder of Olivia’s childhood isn’t as nightmarish as his was. As both of theirs were.

He leans forward and captures Numbers’ bottom lip between his teeth, their differences momentarily forgotten, but Numbers rolls his eyes towards the kid, who’s apparently making some noise like she’s about to wake up. Wrench sighs heavily.

_This was your idea,_ Numbers reminds him, and Wrench doesn’t know if he means the girl or all of it, this seismic shift in their relationship that neither of them is quite prepared to grapple with. 

_It’s still your fault._

_In what way is it my fault?_

Because Numbers was the one who had come careening off the rails, Wrench thinks, long before Duluth but especially after. He’d held on so tightly that first night, his arms around Wrench’s aching ribs and both of them so weak and ravaged by pain that Wrench was half-convinced they’d be dead by morning, and Wrench had never felt so desperately, hopelessly in love with him. But Numbers was never meant to be fragile, never meant to bleed or crumble. He was supposed to keep it all about the job, and if he hadn’t gone running off on his own, if he’d only got the drop on Malvo instead of the other way around, the universe would still have its center.

_You shot first, dumbass,_ Wrench signs, and swings out of bed to hit the shower before Numbers uses up all the hot water.

* * *

Having been assured that she’s not going to be murdered or abandoned by the side of the road, the full scope and effect of Olivia’s brattiness proves as irritating as the half-dead bluebottle that won’t stop its kamikaze attacks against the windows. 

“Is it, like, 50-50 killing versus waiting? Or 40-60?” Apparently she’s decided to be a hit man when she grows up. Or a hit woman. Whatever. 

_10-90,_ Numbers signs. _And none of it is spent talking._ He’s spelling out less today; she’s gotten faster at fingerspelling, but if she doesn’t learn some actual words soon he’s going to get carpel tunnel syndrome. He’s nowhere near as patient a teacher as Wrench was, but she’s a much quicker study than he was, so he figures it evens out. 

“What if you need to pee on a stakeout?” 

He takes a swig of his water bottle and shakes it around, grinning. She wrinkles her nose.

“That’s nasty.” She side-eyes the bottle, so he takes another drink. He’d kill for a beer right now. They ditched the car with its blown-out windows for a decade-old Buick that Wrench must have paid at least a few hundred too much for out of pure nostalgia for the ride he left in Duluth. There’s no AC and at least one of the windows is permanently shut, so the thing’s an oven on wheels. He wipes sweat from his forehead with his shoulder. 

“Have you ever been in jail?” Before he can hold up three fingers, she asks, “What was it like? Did you ever shank someone?” 

_One question at a time,_ he spells out.

This wins him maybe thirty seconds of reprieve from the barrage of questions, which he uses to scan road signs and cast a fleeting glance at his partner, spared from the kid’s endless chatter.

Olivia follows his gaze. “Are his other senses heightened? Like how blind people have better hearing?”

_Blind people don’t—_ he starts, when Wrench—as if to answer her question—somehow notices that they’re talking about him. Numbers signs, face deadpan, _She wants to know if you have deaf-guy superpowers._  

Wrench grins, and his own perpetually black mood lifts a little. They’re on the run, yeah, but it’s not like they haven’t been on the run for the better part of the year, and while he hates the heat, he’ll take it over the bone-aching cold. Wrench lifts his hands off the wheel to sign, _Tell her yes. She’ll behave better._

_How the fuck do you know anything about kids?_  

Wrench’s eyes flit back to the horizon and stay there. Apparently Numbers has triggered some kind of conversational minefield, _again;_ fuck him and the kid and Reinhardt and all of it. He leans his head against the glass and closes his eyes.

He feels Wrench’s hand on his arm and looks over.

_When we get to Lubbock,_ Wrench signs, and keeps driving.

* * *

“Love you too,” Pepper says, and ends the call, slipping his cell back into his pocket. 

“That Vi?” Budge calls from the room.

Pepper pushes the glass sliding door to the balcony all the way open and steps back into the motel room. “ _Actually,_ I was talking to _you_ ,” he says, mock-hurt. “But I take it all back now.”

Budge snorts, running a hand over the spread of papers on the desk. “She good?”

Vi hasn’t been good since—hell, Pepper doesn’t remember the last time Vi was good, so he just shrugs noncommittally. “Find anything?” he asks.

“They ain’t being careful, that’s for sure.” Hutchinson’s couriered over a stack of stills pulled from surveillance cameras across three states, and yeah, the syndicate hit men have been busy. As far as Pepper can see, they’ve mainly been busy buying gas and junk food, but they’ve made no attempt to disguise themselves. The tall one’s even shed the hat. “Albuquerque PD ID’d three of the four dead guys as associates of Abel Reinhardt, upstanding proprietor of several local small business that are in _no way_ drug fronts. Still don’t have shit on the fourth. They’ve had eyes on Reinhardt for a few months now but he’s arms-length. Couple more bodies turned up this morning in Tucson where—” He pulls out one of the grainier surveillance photos. “—coincidentally, our friends were also spotted. Same MO, small caliber, casings everywhere. They ran prints, turns out one of the stiffs is Hutchinson’s CI.”

Pepper studies the red dots scattered across the roadmap. It’s not much of a pattern, just crisscrossing between cities, which makes slightly more sense if the second massacre was also them. “What do you make of this?” He lines up the stills in roughly chronological order. In the first, the two men look more or less like he’d expect suspects in a manhunt to behave—heads down, sunglasses and hats, nearly unidentifiable if the one guy wasn’t so big, and if Pepper and Budge hadn’t been watching them for so long. In one of the later ones, though, the shorter guy’s looking right at the camera. 

Budge turns it. “Dunno. Taunting us? The syndicate used to bail its people out all the time; maybe they know something we don’t.” 

“Not that.” Pepper says, and points.

Budge squints, but he sees her all right. Same girl as in the first photo, the one they’d assumed was just in the lineup in front of them. It’s a whole different city, though, and there she is at the candy rack.

“You sure?” Budge asks. Pepper nods, and Budge doesn’t question any further. Budge might be the manic genius of the two of them, but Pepper notices things like a child in peril. 

Truth is, his reputation isn’t the first thing he’d wish back after all.

“Hostage?” Pepper suggests.

“Maybe.” She’s in arm’s reach of the men in the first picture; in the other, though, she’s closer to the door than she is to them.

“Say it’s weirder,” Budge says. “Say one of them has a kid. Could happen, right? Something happens to mom, it’s enough to bring them out of hiding.”

“So he drags her along to gunfights?” 

“Didn’t say he was father of the year.”

“Shit.” Pepper scratches at his hair. “You know we gotta be a million times more careful now. She could be a kidnap, a human shield, she could be…” 

Budge shoots him a long stare. “You cool, Webb?”

“Fine,” Pepper says. “They want to be found? Let’s go get these assholes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m guessing the entire Wrenchers fandom has seen this, but just in case, check out [Dirty Words With Kristin](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCitRSHXvkmnbipFzWmOtdfA) to find out how to swear like Wrench and Numbers. :)


	8. The Delirium of Negation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wrench and Numbers weave a tangled trail for their pursuers. Budge has a theory.

Olivia’s utility becomes apparent quickly, the first time they need someone to walk into a convenience store and inform the cashier that his store is being robbed. They could write it down, sure, but Wrench thinks it’s Good Practice for Learning to Survive. Numbers has her politely walk up to the clerk. Her hair is swinging in two braids and she’s wearing the sundress Wrench bought for her, new neon flip-flops to replace her worn-out sneakers, she’s smiling, and so the man behind the register doesn’t even think to reach for a gun before Wrench and Numbers have both gone for theirs. Wrench beams at her afterwards like she’s won first prize in a science fair, and Numbers doesn’t scowl at her quite so much after that.

Her affection for them emerges more slowly, a pale green shoot unfurling through a crack in the concrete, invisible right up until it erupts to life. It sinks its hooks into her the night before, while Wrench combs out the tangles in her hair, like her mother used to do when she was little, before the drugs got to her. He’s not looking at her. His long fingers weave the strands into braids as if by rote, and Numbers steals glances at them from above the yellowed pages of a Grisham novel someone’s left on the motel room nightstand when he thinks no one’s watching him. Her eyes follow the illustrated history carved into his skin in ink, faded and blurry at his shoulders, sharper where it arcs around his throat, the bright colors snaking across the lines of his scar. It’s weird to think that she ever found either of them scary. 

She’s embarrassed at the warmth that swells under her ribcage; she’s known them for less than a week, but they’re the closest to family she’s had for as long as she can remember.

She doesn’t tell them, though. Why should she, when they can barely talk to each other?

* * *

Numbers drives through sparse, flat little towns bleached anemic dust-brown in the August heat, blasting music from the car’s tinny radio. The sinking sun casts chain-link shadows and lights rusted-out water tanks to a dull red glow, and no one, beyond old men listlessly smoking on sagging porches, emerges from the squat, broken-down houses.

“Are we even going in the right direction?” Olivia asks, and a few minutes later: “Where _are_ we going?”

Numbers taps Wrench’s arm, watches him spell out: _worst bar in Texas._

She settles back in the seat. Grins. “Awesome.”

* * *

They end up having to qualify it. This is not, Wrench assures them both, the worst bar in Texas. It is not even the worst bar in Taylor County by a long shot, and he’s kind of an expert in these things. 

It is, however, a bar that is a reasonable deviation from their route to Lubbock, across the street from an ATM with a security camera mounted on the closest wall, ten Harleys parked in front of it and half a neon Coors Light sign hanging crookedly from the overhang, so it’s bad _enough._  

_Stay,_ Numbers signs at Olivia. 

“But what if they—” 

Wrench digs out his pocketknife and mimes violently stabbing it into the air before handing it to her.

Numbers makes sure to smile for the camera on his way in. It’s not even a fake smile. He’s looking forward to a beer _that much—_ even if it’s terrible beer—and his body is a tight coil, aching for the release of physical violence. 

Their routine starts the same way it always does. Numbers strides in with a confidence he doesn’t feel, now that he has to point to the tap and make sure that the glare of the pot lights above the bar catches his scar in explanation for his silence. Wrench follows a minute or two later, orders and sits down at the empty seat closest to where two huddles of Bandidos are smoking and pounding at the tables over the music, and it’s a long enough pause for Numbers to remember that they didn’t even discuss their strategy.

They’ve got more than just the bikers for an audience. Across the room, a woman in a tube top that’s losing its elasticity, her weathered skin striped sunburn-pink and white, bends over the jukebox. Nearby, there’s an old man who looks like he’s been there since the afternoon. It’s not packed, but there’s enough of a crowd that they’ll be noticed, and if he plays it right, remembered. Wrench watches him, his long legs spread to either side of the chair. When he does make eye contact, it’s not the hard glare Numbers anticipates.

He takes a swig of his beer. It _is_ shit, watered down from draft, but at least it’s cold.

_Sex in a canoe,_ he signs at Wrench. No one’s watching them yet. Wrench cocks his head to one side, a question. _Fucking near water._

Wrench looks away again. Numbers lets the cold trickle down his parched throat, the condensation on the glass cooling his hand, his muscles already tensing in anticipation. When Wrench at last glances over, he signs, _What’s your problem?_

_Can’t do it,_ Wrench signs back. _Can’t hit you._

Jesus fucking wept. Everyone who knew about them in the syndicate days just assumed their sex life involved whips and chains and torture dungeons—yeah, Numbers heard those rumors, _as_ _if_ they had room in their apartment for one. After all, they’re violent men. They have fought, in anger occasionally, mostly to keep in shape, and often like this, when they need a storm of chaos as cover. But hardly ever off the job, and never, fucking _never_ , without both of them agreeing it was a good idea. Wrench makes it sound like Numbers is a battered wife or some shit; he seethes, eyeing his partner above the rim of his pissy beer. 

Thing is, even before Malvo skewered him like a piece of meat, Wrench could have wiped the floor with Numbers or anyone else if he felt like it. So he pulls his punches and Numbers trusts him not to do any serious damage. Numbers has had a fuck of a lot worse than a black eye; it’s not like he’s made of glass. _We’ve done this before,_ he signs.

_That was before._

ASL brevity being what it is, the rest is implied. That was before Malvo’s knife, before all those nights Wrench held Numbers’ head in his lap, pushed morphine and heroin into his arm and made sympathetic winces at his every twitch of pain. That was before the shakes and the night terrors that have done what a hundred gunfights and brawls couldn’t manage—convince Wrench that Numbers was fallible. That he could be killed, that he is some fragile thing, like the child hiding in their car, requiring protection at all costs.

As if he wants Wrench’s pity. He’d thought they’d reached an understanding. He frowns, hands braced on the stool on either side of him, more than ready to land the first punch if Wrench is too chickenshit.

_Got a better idea,_ Wrench signs. He crosses the floor—not with his usual swagger, but with stupid little mincing steps, making sure to catch the eye of several of the bikers, and _oh fuck no he is not thinking—_

Wrench slides one hand along his thigh and the other through Numbers’ hair, lifts his head and plants a firm kiss on his lips. Before the first biker can even launch into shouts of disgust, Numbers shoves him off and smashes a fist across his jaw. Wrench doesn’t want to hurt him, sure, but he still has reflexes and he’s fucking massive, and the swing of his arm is enough to toss Numbers like a ragdoll into the nearest table. 

Wrench is on top of him in an instant, pushing him into the beer-sticky floor, one hand pressing against his chest while he backhands the closest biker who’s rushed in to join the fight. It’s apparent that Wrench wants him to stay down, but fuck it, he wants to punch something even more than he wants a beer. The second Wrench whirls to deal with another of the Bandidos—and Numbers is absurdly grateful that Wrench can’t hear what the fucker just called him—he’s up again, grabbing the half-empty pint glass on the table and bashing it across the balding skull of the nearest man he can find.

He lasts thirty seconds, maybe more; it’s hard to tell in the blur of adrenaline. He can take a punch as well as he can give one. He can take ten punches, and does. And then one of the bikers goes for a knife in his boot. His heart knocking against his ribs, firing off little bursts of panic through his veins, Numbers scrambles for the gun tucked into his belt and it’s only Wrench wrestling his arms behind his back that saves the asshole, and every other asshole in the bar, from a face full of lead.

It takes two men to throw Numbers, coughing and spluttering into the dust, out the front door, Old West style. It would have taken far more than that to restrain Wrench, but he staggers out willingly, braced over Numbers’ prone body.

Numbers rolls onto his back. Wrench has a split lip and a smear of blood along his jaw, and the angry red circle around his eye socket will bruise.

_Next time let me finish my fucking beer,_ he signs. Wrench pulls him to his feet and drags him out of there so fast that he barely has time to flip off the camera above the ATM. No one bothers to chase them farther than half the block and he can hear the woman with the sunburn on the payphone to 911, so, mission accomplished. He’s sweaty and panting when he slides into the driver’s seat, blood trickling from a gash in his scalp, and he looks away from Wrench’s reddened knuckles.

“So that went well?” Olivia pipes up.

_Fuck you both,_ Numbers signs, and guns the engine until they’re back on the highway.

* * *

Four a.m., the hour of the wolf, not that you’d know it from the thin ambient light that seeps through the window and the crack under the door even now, and Budge wakes up with a gasp that pushes all the air out of his lungs. He looks over to see if he’s disturbed Pepper, but of course his partner was already awake, sitting against the headboard of his own bed, the orange glow of the shaded lamp on the nightstand falling over the pile of papers on his lap.

“What if we’re already dead?” Budge mutters, mostly to himself. 

“The fuck?”

“If this was the last dying flicker of your neurons before you expired,” Budge says, “would you be able to tell?”

“Yeah,” Pepper says, as if it’s completely normal to be having this conversation. It is, Budge thinks, for them. “Pretty sure I’d know.” He shuffles the papers before placing the folder back on the nightstand.

Budge doesn’t need to look at the pictures. He has every detail woven into memory, the latest ones, blurs of movement frozen in deliberate provocation toward them. The syndicate men know that there’s an APB out on them, they know they’re being watched, and for the life of him, he can’t figure out what they’re up to or why they’re so deliberately drawing attention to themselves when there hasn’t been a peep from anyone else ever connected to Fargo.

It’s possible, of course, that they don’t have a plan at all, or that they’re planning some blazing glory suicide-by-cop for whatever reason. But he has too much invested in this, professionally speaking, to buy that. The syndicate didn’t employ idiots and it’s logical to assume that these two are acting according to some as-yet-unknown agenda, even if it looks like they’re just wandering around picking fights with yokels—but it’s bigger than that.

There is a pattern to the universe, an overarching narrative. Try as he might, Budge has never been able to accept that existence is nothing more than a constellation of random cruelties and small joys; his own path, and Pepper’s, has crossed the paths of these two men for some greater purpose. There has to be a reason, beyond chance, that they survived, that they were the _only_ ones to survive, there must be some vital information that they had to live long enough to pass on. 

He eyes the tangle of red pen across their roadmap, and wonders how his partner manages to make his peace with things just _happening,_ one after another, with no order or sense of justice behind them _._ Wonders if that makes life easier or harder, with Vi, with Fargo, with everything else.

The kid’s not in the last photo. Pepper hasn’t said anything about it, and Budge just hopes to hell it’s not a bad sign. 

“How’d we die?” Pepper asks, quietly, into the dark. “That our neurons are making us hallucinate all this?” 

Budge takes a long time to answer. “Maybe we got old,” he offers. “Brains turned to mush, grandkids sitting patiently at the bed waiting for someone to read out the will.”

“I ain’t getting any grandkids,” Pepper reminds him.

“Maybe heroically, then. In the line of duty.”

“If that’s the case,” Pepper said, “I could hallucinate something better than being stuck in a motel room with you going over a case that makes no goddamned sense.”

Budge chuckles. It’s almost time for them to be up on the road again. They’ve got a meeting scheduled with Hutchinson, an interview with one of the eyewitnesses who may or may not have spotted their guys.

“Shit,” he says. “What could be better than that?”

* * *

They stick up two more convenience stores, during which they manage a grand total of $106.75 from the combined cash registers and as many packs of cigarettes as Numbers can stuff into his pockets, then stop at a diner for what’s become a tradition of breakfast-at-dinner-time. Numbers hasn’t held up a store—well, not on his own initiative, anyway—since he was in high school, and it feels petty and stupid and he fucking _hates_ how impressed Olivia looks by the whole thing even if he’ll admit she’s better at it than they are in some ways. 

_You’re a terrible influence,_ Numbers tells Wrench. He rips open the cellophane wrap on a pack of smokes with his teeth, stuffs the discarded shell behind the napkin dispenser. Wrench shrugs, as if to remind him that it’s not as though either of them were raised any better.

Their conversation—what little of it there is—is interrupted by their waitress. She leans over Numbers, her breasts practically in his face, and chirps, “Refill, hon?”

Numbers pushes his empty coffee cup towards the edge of the table, barely glancing up for long enough to see her smile as if he wasn’t a surly bastard. Maybe they’re all nice down south, a warmer, differently-accented sort of nice from Minnesota, but he despises it just as much. He’s used to Wrench being talked to like that, greeted with extra-wide smiles once he’s been categorically reassigned from “big scary cowboy with a murderous death-glare” to “tragic disabled Golden Retriever puppy” in their minds, and has long suspected that the only thing that keeps his partner from exploding at people is that he can’t actually hear what condescension sounds like. He’s not used to it for himself; he’s looked like a badass ever since he was old enough to grow facial hair, but the scar and the little girl tagging after him make it clear that he’s been defanged.

Through the white noise buzz of his own thoughts, he hears Olivia order for all of them. She’s Wrench’s new voice now, and even if it’s better than having to point at a menu, he resents it.

Once the waitress has vanished, the girl counts the money, orders the bills from smallest to largest, then divides it into three even piles like it’s a proper heist instead of kiddie shit. She slides one pile across to each of them, solemnly, the way a regular child might assign roles in dress-up.

_What the fuck is this?_ Numbers signs. She catches enough of it. 

“We're all partners now,” she says. “Right?”

He snatches the money and shoves it in his jacket before someone less blatantly moronic can see what they’re doing.

_What crawled up your ass?_ Wrench asks.

_Explain to my replacement—_ he signs the last word very slowly— _how we divide up the money._

Wrench just rolls his eyes, ignores the dig, and continues attacking his scrambled eggs. _Think we’ve left enough of a trail yet?_

Their path has veered south, then doubled back; if anyone’s connecting the dots, it probably looks like they’re planning a run across the Mexican border. If anyone’s following them, they’re either doing a really great job or an incredibly shit one.

Nothing from Reinhardt, which is worrying in itself. But it’s probably enough of a head start, and Wrench assures him that the people he knows in his hometown are too stupid to have made connections with anyone, least of all out of state.

Planning their next move means that he doesn’t need to think about how Wrench doesn’t need him anymore, how he’s too easily spooked to even hold his own in a fucking bar brawl, how there are things about his partner that he’s never asked and doesn’t know, and so he writes down a list, bottled water, more food, if they have to go off the grid altogether, more ammo if it turns out Wrench is wrong about his old contacts, stuffs it at Olivia and signs at her to make herself useful.

She just nods, still riding off the high from robbing stores, and he wonders if he ever felt like that, whether there was anything to his brutality but a crushing sense of obligation. She’s eager enough to be Wrench’s little apprentice, and maybe she should be, maybe there’s no fight left in him anymore, the last of it fled from him, dripping red into the snow.

Still, he’s got one last promise to fulfill, a stand to make if it comes to that. Wrench is distracted—Numbers can’t even begin to guess what’s on his mind right now—and even if he’s drifting away after all these years, someone has to watch his back.

Then, he thinks, then maybe it will all be over.

* * *

There’s a long list of things Abel Reinhardt wants to do before he dies (at 90, at a beach house, attended by nubile 20-year-olds, with a Mai Tai in each hand), but rooting through the underwear drawer in a bachelor apartment formerly inhabited by two men of radically different standards of cleanliness is not one of them. It’s the sort of task he’d normally assign an asset to, except that trusting his men to a) not fuck up, b) not miss some crucial detail, and c) not turn out to be traitors who gun down his top lieutenant and run off with his cash and drugs, he wouldn’t be in this position in the first place. 

It’s a sad, small life these two assholes must have led. They own nothing, not that there’s any room for it in the shithole that passes for an apartment. The place is littered with chip bags and cigarette butts. He finds a few thousand dollars stuffed into a hole in the mattress, which begs the question of why they wouldn’t have taken that with them when they decided to betray him. They have no effects that might be considered personal, nothing so much as a bill for cable. The phone isn’t even plugged in to the wall, which makes sense half a minute later when he remembers that a phone’s not much use to a deaf guy and a mute guy and it must have just come with the place.

The landlord, after intense questioning and tied with belts to the apartment’s one chair, doesn’t know much about them beyond copping to fucking the deaf guy back when he was hustling in his teens. The two of them had shown up on his doorstep almost twenty years later, looking for work, so he’d hooked them up with Reinhardt’s crew as a favor. When they’re not on jobs for Reinhardt, they stay in, and he doesn’t hear them for reasons obvious. Maybe, he suggests (shuddering beneath the electric sizzle of the Taser), he’s gone home, but fuck knows where that is. He thinks the deaf guy’s maybe a Dallas Cowboys fan but in a state that big, that doesn’t narrow the geography down that much.

And no, he doesn’t know their names. No one does, and they never talk, how’s he expected to—which is when Reinhardt stuffs the Taser in his mouth to shut him up.

Now he’s wrist-deep in another man’s underwear when his cell rings. Hutchinson, with the worst timing known to fuck.

He starts to babble, asking whether Reinhardt’s found anything. From the echo, he’s probably in the can to get away from the FBI guys. Reinhardt interrupts him. “How much did your snitch know?” 

A pause, then, “Let’s just say that you don’t want the FBI to get a hold of the Fargo boys before you do.”

He pushes down the nausea. Probably just something he ate. There’s only so much anyone knows about the cozy little arrangement he has with the DEA, and Hutchinson’s got more to lose than he does.

“So,” Hutchinson says, almost casually. “What do you know about a girl?”


	9. Lubbock (Side A)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wrench is tormented by his past. Numbers is insecure. Pepper is haunted. Everyone angsts, quite a lot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did promise fluff. It's coming, but not in this chapter.
> 
> TW for oblique references to child abuse, including of the sexual variety, neglect, and miscarriage.

Olivia, who’d never been more than 50 miles from her hometown until the day they’d met her, is in awe of the rugged, barren rocks of the canyon, a jagged slash of ochre across an indigo sky darkening to black. Wrench—claiming that a child shouldn’t be pent up in a car for hours on end—insists they let her go running along the shore of the lake as the night settles over it. She’s not much of a runner; she trips and stumbles over the rocks and Numbers thinks she’s probably humoring Wrench, not that he can blame her. 

Numbers isn’t _unimpressed_ by the view as such. It’s just that he’s not so keen on nature, which as far as he’s concerned is dirty, boring, and full of insects that crave his blood nearly as much as Malvo did. 

Wrench, however, looks like he belongs here. Even without his fringed jacket (even after seven months, Numbers can’t think about it without thinking about what happened to it, how they’d have to have cut it off him, filed it away as evidence with the blood dried rust into the suede) he might have stepped out of some old cowboy movie, two days’ worth of stubble filling in his jaw line below his muttonchops, and fuck, Numbers could have never imagined falling as hard as he did for that schtick. Now he doesn’t want to imagine life without him, even as the prospect looms ever closer. 

But Wrench is as impassive as the steep red stone at his back, watching the stars flicker across the surface of the lake, and the only sound is the lapping of waves against the shore, bullfrog song echoing off the rocks. Silence never used to be their problem. Compared to how it was for them between assignments, stuck in Fargo listening to Jergen talk shit for hours on end, Numbers found a certain kind of mindless peace in the long drives out to collect whatever shitheel had placed himself on the syndicate’s naughty list. He _liked_ Wrench at first because Wrench was perfectly content to read with him in the tense moments before they erupted into violence or sex or both. Now, though, he feels the weight of that silence bearing down on him.

Too many fucking stars out here, he decides. He doesn’t need a reminder of how insignificant he is.

Amazingly, miraculously, Wrench breaks first.

_She’s not your fucking replacement._ He hasn’t let the girl out of his sight; even now, Numbers can see him tracking her movement up ahead. _Fuck you for even thinking that._  

_Why not?_ Numbers signs. _She can rob stores with you. She can talk for you. It’s more than I do._  

_You think I put up with your neurotic bullshit all these years because you translate for me?_

Numbers slumps into the wall of the canyon. The sharp edge of the rock digs at his back, but fuck it, pain is the one thing that won’t ever leave him so he might as well embrace it.

_It wasn’t because you needed someone to rescue from a panic attack during a job._

Wrench whirls on him, teeth clenching. _Why do you have to assume everyone else is as much of an asshole as you are? I don’t need anything from you. I never have._

_Yeah,_ Numbers tells him. _That’s obvious._  

_What the fuck do you think I am?_ His hands are frantic now, a pale blur in the encroaching dark. _You think I’d stop loving you because you can’t talk? I have never even heard your voice._ Wrench shakes his head, his mouth (bottom lip still swollen and cracked; Numbers could push forward, taste copper on his tongue—but it’s far too late for that now) twisted in disbelief. _You know what? Fuck you._

He’s gone before Numbers can stop him—not that Numbers could ever make him do anything, and how can he be surprised that Wrench is that easy to drive away?—retreating up the jagged path to where the car’s parked. Numbers lights a smoke and barely notices the stir of movement at his elbow until he turns his head to see Olivia.

_How much?_ he asks her, then gestures at his ear.

“Enough. But I didn’t really understand. You guys are fighting again?” He shrugs. She bites her lip. “About me?”

Wrench would have found some other way out eventually, regardless. He can’t blame the girl for being where she is. It’s all his own inadequacy; it always has been.

“But he loves you. You gotta know that, right?” She shifts from one foot to the other, clearly uncomfortable with her new role as a marriage counselor for emotionally stunted hit men. “He never takes his eyes off you. Like, ever. And you love him, or you wouldn’t be so pissed off at him.”

It must be so simple to get your ideas about relationships from daytime TV. Though, from what he saw of her home life, what he remembers of his own, there are worse role models to have. 

_I could still kill you and hide your body where no one would ever find it,_ he signs, lest she get any ideas about the degree to which they’re going to talk about their feelings.

“Sure, whatever. I missed half of that but you were probably being a dick, am I right?” He guesses she got “kill” and “body”; she’s learning sign language pretty much the way he did, after all. 

_Go talk to him._ She tries to use words instead of spelling it out, but she overcomplicates it and arranges the signs like an English sentence. He shows it to her properly, then—hesitant, awkward; he hasn’t willingly touched anyone other than Wrench in years—pats her shoulder.

Far be it from him to take advice from an 11-year-old who is only less fucked-up than he is by virtue of not having lived as long, but: _I guess I should._

* * *

Vi calls twice in the time it takes them to head out on the road, this time for Texas, where it’s increasingly clear their quarry is headed. 

The Albuquerque DEA office is a hive of activity. Budge is on the phone trying to talk someone into issuing an AMBER Alert for the little girl—whose name they don’t have, who exists in snippets of blurry surveillance camera footage but not in the National Child Identification Program database, who may not even be travelling with the men against her will—without much success. Hutchinson is tracking drug busts and contacting CIs across three states. And Pepper is on and off an irritating series of calls with his SAC, pleading for more time, arguing once again that following the rapidly chilling trail is not, in fact, an egregious waste of Bureau resources.

Vi punctuates these conversations with stilted quiet, her breath soft through the cell’s speaker. Pepper has to duck into an unused office to even hear her.

She loves him, that’s a given, he’s always known that, always loved her back, easy as breathing. It’s the rest that’s hard. No, she didn’t go into work today. Couldn’t. Yes, she misses him. Needs him back. She hasn’t been able to walk into the room in half a year; it’d be better if he were there to paint over the pale yellow they’d spent months choosing. 

He leans into someone else’s desk, in someone else’s office, listens to her voice, says nothing beyond that he’ll be back when he can. 

She’s less confrontational than his SAC was, but her question’s the same. “Is there anything that you have to gain from this?” 

“Closure?” She knows better to ask why he can’t find that back in Fargo. In his house, there’s a room sitting empty; in his city, offices about a Chinese restaurant that can’t be rented out at any price even though the carpets have been replaced, the blood washed out of the pavement below. “Just a few more days,” he promises. “We’re closing in on them. I’ll be home before you know it.”

(Later, lying in a pool of blood on a warehouse floor, this conversation is on repeat in his head. What had they said to each other, before they’d ended the call? Had he told her that he loved her?) 

“Get your stuff,” Budge calls from outside the door. That’s the bit that he remembers. “Hutchinson got a tip-off. We’re rolling out.”

* * *

He finds Wrench by the car, parked on top of the ridge, the city in hazy, distant view. 

_You were going to tell me,_ Numbers says instead of apologizing. _About the person she reminds you of._

_You won’t understand._

Numbers rolls his eyes. _Now_ who’s making assumptions? _I had a sex life before you too, you know._

Wrench’s nose wrinkles in disgust. _She was my sister, you sick fuck._

Certain fragments snap into place. Others don’t so much fit. _Thought you grew up in foster care._

He nods. _Not alone._ He sits down, back to the wheel, and Numbers sits across from him. It’s hell on his spine, but he gets the sense it’s a long story and Wrench has been waiting a long time to tell it. 

_I was born in a trailer._ He gestures vaguely in the direction of the highway, as if it were possible to see the trailer park itself from where they’re sitting _. Crystal was a few years younger than me. She might have been my half-sister. She was so beautiful._ Numbers doesn’t mention that he’s now picturing a very tiny, very trashy Wrench in drag. Which is kind of adorable—given the degree to which his brain has warped anything vaguely associated with Wrench to be cute no matter how tacky—but it’s probably not the most accurate image. _They all just thought I was slow at first, except her._

There’s no change in his facial expression. He’s had a lifetime to adjust to the things that should, by all rights, make him furious. Numbers hasn’t.

_My teacher figured it out when I was in first grade for the second time. Child services showed up at the park._ He glances over at Olivia, who’s down by the lake, watching them, too far and not even close to so adept at reading sign language that she’d be able to understand what they’re saying. _It was like where she was living. Worse. We were eating out of the garbage and sleeping in our own piss and puke. They took us away that same day, and I never saw my mother again._

Numbers reaches across the space between them, touches his knee, but Wrench is a statue, his breathing even and deliberate. _Just let me get through this._  

_You never told anyone else?_

Wrench shakes his head. Right. Who the fuck would he tell? _They tried to keep us together, but we got bounced around a lot. Different homes, different schools. I was difficult._ A proud little smirk at that. _She looked out for me even though she was younger. We had our own secret language, the kind kids make up when they get too close, when they don’t have anyone else to get close to. When they found out I was deaf, she learned ASL for me._

_She was hearing?_

Wrench nods. _She was my whole world._ There’s an entire Southern Gothic novel lurking behind laconic gesture, with its ghosts and shallow graves, and if Numbers had known, he wouldn’t have been such an asshole about it. _She was adoptable. I wasn’t._

_And then you didn’t have anyone._

_I didn’t know where she went. She was just gone one day. They told me she had a new family._ His fingers clench and unclench in half-words, too raw to finish. _I was her fucking family. I didn’t understand. I hated her for so many years, for staying there, with them, for getting what I couldn’t._

Numbers says nothing. He watches his partner struggle for control, and mostly retain it.

_Eventually, someone took me in. Good Christians, wanted to bring the poor little deaf kid to Jesus._

_You must have been the most adorable choirboy,_ he signs, only belatedly remembering that Wrench couldn’t have been. 

Wrench favors him with a small, bitter grin. _The star quarterback at my high school thought so too. At least until they caught me blowing him under the bleachers. I fucked off for greener pastures after. Best for everyone involved._

_How old?_

_Sixteen_. Most of the rest, Numbers thinks, he knows. Three years of sleeping rough and soup kitchens and truck stop hand jobs until Fargo found him, until Numbers did, and it’s all he can do to let Wrench finish, to not just pull him into his arms and hold him forever. To not descend upon the city like righteous vengeance from the heavens and burn it to the ground for what it had put him through. _I never stopped looking for her._  

Numbers needs to ask, though he already knows the answer. _Did you find her?_

_Yes_.

After all the bickering, the fraught, misplaced mistrust, he’d give Wrench as long as he needs. Slow minutes trickle by. Once or twice, Wrench looks like he’s about to start, or run, and instead kicks at pebbles with the toe of his boot, reaches for the pack of smokes in Numbers’ front pocket. Numbers hands him a cigarette, cups his hand around it to light it, and that seems to reassure him enough that he can finish.

_She was the first person I ever tracked. I spent hours in libraries squinting at microfiche. There was a newspaper article. Four kids in a car, too much to drink, and they took a turn too fast. Classic stupid statistic. She was the driver. None of them made it._

Mouth clenched in a rictus sneer around his cigarette, he throws up his hands; that was that, _finito,_ fuckin’ curtains. There’s nothing Numbers can say. All the words he knows are meaningless platitudes and it’s never been a revelation that wherever he’d come from, Wrench had been alone before, that alone is his default state, and Numbers, if anything, is the aberration. He might as well have it marked on his skin, like the name Numbers has in Hebrew (his mother’s name, and she’d roll in her grave if she’d been alive to see it, but that was kind of the point) between sparrows and horse heads and grinning skulls.

He moves closer, so their knees are touching. Wrench takes another drag off his cigarette. He looks like the fucking Marlboro Man, like a snippet of a country song, lonesome and deadly. Numbers reaches for his hands, but Wrench pulls away again.

_I found things out, later, about her new family. Why she drank. What they did to her. CPS should have left us in that trailer. We would have been better off._

Numbers starts to sign, _Well, fuck_ , but Wrench is already stubbing out the cigarette, half-smoked on the rocks, so that he can grip fistfuls of Numbers’ shirt. They collide, crash into each other, Wrench with his face pressed into the top of Numbers’ head, his broad shoulders shuddering, Numbers, his hands as awkward and useless for signing as they are for shooting, running his nails down the sweat-drenched back of his partner’s t-shirt until he stills. Wrench won’t kiss him, but he clings, his arms strong and tight around Numbers’ back even as he shivers like a tiny child.

When—long minutes later—they separate, Numbers signs, _Is there anyone you want me to kill?_  

Wrench, stone-faced, replies: _You think I didn’t take care of it already?_

_I’m sorry._

_For what? Not having a fucking time machine?_

Numbers flicks two fingers towards Olivia. Their silent, incomprehensible conversation must have bored her, because she’s trying to climb the edge of the canyon now, testing her flimsy plastic flip-flops against the rock.

_I should have looked harder,_ Wrench tells him. _I left her too long._

_You were just a kid._ God, Numbers thinks, it couldn’t have been more than a few years before they’d met. He still remembers what Wrench was like then, all angry macho bluster and weaponized vulnerability, like he’d been grown in a Petri dish for the sole purpose of breaking Numbers to pieces. _But you know, she—_ he looks towards Olivia— _isn’t your sister._

_I told you._ Wrench leans forward, runs knuckles along the side of his head. _I’m not looking for replacements._

_What then? A family?_ He misses his voice, the ability to spit out the word with derision. _We don’t get to have families._

Wrench gives him a hard stare. _Maybe._ He doesn’t look convinced, but then, his family at least had the decency to die in a manner that could be mourned. That didn’t involve a barrage of lead and shattered glass. At least Wrench had had one person, if only briefly, that he could love without ambivalence.

Though, he reflects, that probably just makes it even worse.

_They’ll take her away from us,_ Numbers tells him. He doesn’t need to explain who “they” are; with the world gunning for them, it’s only a matter of time.

_They can try._ He hesitates, like he wants to reach out and can’t, and isn’t that half the fundamental contradiction in their relationship, that they can talk or they can touch but never both at once? _You okay with this?_  

Numbers is pretty sure he’s actually insisted every step of the way that this is a terrible idea. That doesn’t change the fact that he clawed his way back to the world of the living for the giant idiot, or that he’d give him anything he asked for.

_Yeah,_ he signs. It’s getting darker; the chill as the desert turns to night felt more in his bones than in his skin. Time to be on the move again, to keep fighting their way forward. _I’m with you._

* * *

“So it’s a riddle?” 

Hutchinson’s driving and Budge called shotgun, which means that Pepper’s squeezed in the back with everyone’s briefcases and Budge is talking their ears off.

“It’s a paradox,” Budge says. “Well, kinda. See, taken individually, everyone’s actions in the story are rational and honest, but taken in aggregate, the result is by necessity irrational.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re on about,” Hutchinson says. He jerks his head back at Pepper. “Do you know what the fuck he’s on about?”

“Practically never,” Pepper says.

Hutchinson draws a deep—very patient, Pepper thinks—breath. “Why not just smash the bottle, kill the thing inside, and enjoy your newfound riches? Problem solved.”

“You’re missing the _point,_ ” Budge says.

“I really don’t think he is.”

Hutchinson’s segue is both graceless and welcome. “What’s the play here?” he asks. “You’ve tracked these guys for over a year. On a scale of Bambi to Rambo, how badass are we talking?” 

“Assume armed and dangerous,” Pepper says.

“Very,” Budge clarifies. “Very armed and very dangerous.” 

Hutchinson is quiet for a moment. “You think the girl’s dead.”

They all know the stats: 72 hours, and it’s unlikely that a child kidnapping victim will be found alive. With the bump in trafficking that the DEA’s documented in the region, there’s also no shortage of reasons she might still be breathing but no longer with them, far beyond reach of the two agencies trying so desperately to locate her.

“We need to bring them in alive,” Pepper says. “It’s the only way we’re gonna find her.”

“Yeah,” Hutchinson says. A shadow flickers over his face; it’s brief, but Pepper sees it, and judging by the look Budge shoots at him though the rearview mirror, his partner sees it too. “Yeah, sure, of course.”

“Any sign of them,” Pepper tells him. “Anything at all, we call for backup. These guys don’t fuck around.” He tries not to think too hard on the fact that Duluth PD’d had plenty of backup too.

Hutchinson squints through the windshield. “Storm’s comin’ in,” he observes; needlessly, it’s been on the news, and no one needs to say that a hurricane is better for criminals than it is for the lawmen tracking them. But at least, Pepper thinks, he can pretend that the throbbing behind his eyes comes from the changing pressure front and not from his own mounting dread. “Nothing for it,” he mutters. “Just gotta get the job done.” 

Pepper thinks they all feel the tremor at once, the low rumble of thunder, the swift movement of clouds closing in above a distant horizon. He watches a flock of swallows take flight against the sky, spiraling upwards in dark mass, then at last dissolving, far above them, into grey.


	10. Lubbock (Side B)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amusement parks, ghosts, and a parting of the ways.

_No,_ Numbers signs. _And also, no and fuck no._  

_By which you mean fuck yes,_ Wrench replies, the brightly painted, rickety deathtraps careening in tortured spirals from behind the flat highway wasteland. _Clearly._

_Did you miss how we have an APB out on us and large quantities of money and drugs in the trunk of the car?_

_Did you miss that we have four hours to kill before the buyer shows?_ Wrench checks his watch. _Four and a half._ He’s spent half the day ducking in and out of sketchy bars, ordering Numbers to stay with the girl and keep an eye on her. Lubbock is his turf, and this shit is best done alone; Numbers, though he may be a little less conspicuously fancy these days by dint of being on the run, is going to put “these kinds of guys”—signed with accompanying mildly disgusted facial expressions—off. 

Wrench has managed to track down some old contacts. (Numbers suppresses a flare of jealousy at this: Why does he _have_ old contacts anyway? He’s worked for Fargo for 15 years. How does a gay deaf kid in Texas even _get_ contacts in the first place?) He’s found a buyer for the drugs, some toothless bumblefuck approximately 2000 times more redneck than Wrench himself. And while Numbers is, at this point, aching to be anywhere besides pent up in the car, a decrepit amusement park is not exactly his idea of an escape.

But Wrench is giving him The Look. The Look says that he’s an exposed nerve from spilling forth the horrific details of his upbringing the night before; he’s jonesing for distraction and they’ve got a kid with them who deserves to experience something other than blood and death and a dreary shuffle from lowlife to lowlife. The Look says that if Numbers wants to get laid any time in the near future, he’s going to have to trudge through this saccharine-toxic, cacophonous vomitorium until the scheduled meeting time, or until the two actual children in his company get bored, whichever happens first.

It’s a fucking revelation, truly, how much Wrench can communicate without being able to speak.

_Fine,_ he signs, and Olivia’s shy little smile—and Wrench’s huge grin in response—almost makes up for it. 

This goodwill lasts approximately until he’s paid the entrance fee for all of them and is immediately beset by a squall of shrieking children and the reek of cotton candy and funnel cake. He can see absolutely nothing appealing about the situation. He can’t even—like the parents waiting patiently for their screaming progeny to climb jelly-legged off the rides—hold his partner’s hand, both because they’re in the fucking South and also because Wrench is even more eager to ride the tilt-a-whirl than Olivia is. He scans for somewhere dark and quiet to skulk, but there’s no respite from any of it.

The kid’s waving excitedly at the rollercoaster (which, fuck, _creaks_ as the cars ascend the steep track) and a cursory glance suggests that Wrench is far too tall to fold comfortably into one of the seats, so Wrench hands her a fistful of tickets and lets her run up ahead. 

_This place is a child abductor’s all-you-can-eat buffet,_ Numbers signs. 

_I’m watching,_ Wrench assures him. _It’s cute that you’re worried._  

Numbers scowls. _I just know how pissed you’d be if she got dismembered by a psycho clown._

Wrench stares at him a few more seconds than is prudent in a place like this, then shoves his shoulder and signs, _Come on, I’ll buy you a bag of those tiny donuts,_ and Numbers is reminded that whatever secrets they keep from each other, Wrench is still the person who knows him better than anyone else in the world—and yet, for whatever reason, wants him around.

* * *

She rides the rollercoaster. Twice, lining up patiently in anticipation of the thrill of the swoops and plummets. She closes her eyes and feels the wind in her hair, the butterflies in her stomach. At first she pretends she’s on Space Mountain in Disneyland and not at some run-down park off the freeway, but on the second sweeping descent, she tells herself that no one’s ever going to take her to Disneyland but two near-strangers cared enough to at least take her here—which is more than she’d ever expected, more than she’d ever asked for—and the wind beats tear tracks down her face.

She almost trips coming off, bashes into a large man dismounting in front of her, and as she recovers her equilibrium, slips his wallet out of his back pocket, and scampers off to buy herself more tickets. 

When she’s had her fill of the rides, Olivia spots Wrench and Numbers up ahead, engaged in a frantic maybe-argument, maybe-dirty-talk, maybe-an-emphatic-debate-about-rollercoasters, and she makes her way towards them.

She lifts a few more wallets before she gets there, though.

* * *

About the only attraction at the fair that’s in any way appealing—tiny donuts and the way Wrench’s faded jeans hug his ass aside—is a shooting gallery so unimpressive that the acne-scarred kid at the booth can’t even be bothered to shout them over. Wrench, of course, wants to try his hand at it. He leans in, outlines of muscle visible beneath the thin fabric of his t-shirt, and Numbers is enjoying the sight right up until, at the last minute, he slides aside to let Numbers take his place.

_Don’t we do this enough?_ Numbers signs. 

Wrench cocks an eyebrow. _Afraid you won’t hit anything?_

_These things are rigged._

_You just don’t want to look bad in front of a little girl._

_Yeah, I’m really concerned about that._ He adjusts the gun so that he’s not quite aiming at the target, pushes his shoulder into the butt of the air rifle to steady it. He’s steeling himself for disappointment, and it shouldn’t matter—this is just a game, and his aim has been fine when it’s a matter of Wrench’s life on the line—but he’s prepared for failure when he feels Olivia’s small hand tug his sleeve.

“That’s not even fair,” she says. “You guys do this for a living. Lemme have a turn.”

He won’t admit that he’s relieved, or acknowledge the heat that rises to his face, just moves aside to watch the kid take aim. The first time, the shot just barely brushes the outside of the target. He eyes the trajectory, the probable curve of the barrel, and places his hands over hers to lower the rifle. She fires again, this time into one of the inner circles, and claps her hands together. 

Olivia hands Numbers the huge pink elephant, glassy-eyed and reeking of off-gassing, that she’s won, and whispers conspiratorially, “You’d have done fine.” Then she spins on her heels and hugs Wrench tightly. Startled, he closes his arms around her, comically large in comparison; he could break her so easily were he not—deep down, and all the murder and torture aside—at some level an oddly gentle soul. 

“Let’s go ride the Skyride,” the girl says, tugging at his hand.

Numbers translates around the awkwardly juggled elephant—seriously, what are they supposed to do with it?—and adds, _No fucking way. Have you seen the mouthbreathers working those things?_

Wrench laughs. _You’re such a chickenshit._

_The fuck I am._

_I can’t believe you’ll walk into a roomful of pissed off psychos with guns and you won’t get on a kiddie ride._

_That’s different. I have a fighting chance in a roomful of psychos. If that thing goes…_ His hands sketch the outline an explosion and he almost drops the elephant.

_You can hold your own with psychos because I got your back._ Wrench’s hand snakes out to ruffle his hair, lightning-fast so he doubts anyone else sees it. Even still. _I do here, too. Promise._  

Numbers rolls his eyes, but dutifully stands in line and finally drags out the rest of their tickets so that the slack-jawed yokel can let them on. They squeeze into the carriage, Olivia squished between them with the stupid elephant resting on her lap. They’re stuck in place while the ride makes groaning noises, as if it’s straining to move, then the carriage rattles and rises into the air.

_You wouldn’t like this if you could hear it,_ Numbers signs. _It’s probably older than you are._

Someone gets on behind them—he hears the safety bar clamp into place—and then the carriage jerks up another few feet. Olivia wraps her hand around the door of the car and peers over the edge. If they fell from this height, Numbers thinks, it’d hurt like a motherfucker but they’d survive it. Not much higher, though.

Contrary to general impressions, he wasn’t raised by wolves, and his parents humored his childhood whims— _once,_ just the once—by taking him to a place like this, where he’d repaid their indulgences by vomiting all over his father’s shoes. He didn’t remember any ride being this slow, like Chinese water torture. Olivia looks excited by it, though, so maybe it’s just him.

Wrench is on the outside so he’s theoretically got the best view, if you like that kind of thing. He doesn’t look at the fairground below them, though, or the crisscrossed underpasses and dry brown trees beyond. He’s just watching Numbers, serious and intent, like he’s studying a hit.

_Thanks for this,_ he signs after a while. Then, _I’ll blow you after the kid goes to sleep._

Numbers pushes down the queasiness in his stomach and smirks. _You better. The shit I put up with for you._

Wrench fake-yawns so that he can wrap his arm around both of them. Olivia leans her head against his side and Numbers—grudgingly, the entire exercise an affront to what’s left of his dignity—lets his partner’s mammoth hand cup his shoulder. Once the ride gets going, it’s not quite so jerky, and he relaxes by degrees. It _is_ a nice view, and it’s a bit like being in the passenger seat when Wrench is in a hurry to get somewhere. Mildly terrifying, yeah, but the type of terror that’s well beyond his influence to control, and he won’t deny that there’s a certain kind of release in that.

“Hey,” Olivia says abruptly. “I stole four wallets.” 

Numbers instantly thinks to chide her, because that’s what responsible adults do, but Wrench grins and signs, _Atta girl,_ not that she’s likely to understand it. She pulls them out of her backpack and spreads them out on her legs. 

Wrench holds up three fingers; a question. 

She straightens where she’s leaning into his side and reveals the fourth, tan leather and worn at the edges, tugged out of his jeans. Then holds up four fingers proudly. Wrench laughs and recaptures his wallet, every inch the proud dad.

Numbers realizes he’s utterly fucked. He can’t extricate himself from this. He can’t even make himself want to. 

They have less than 24 hours before the storm, when everything goes to hell all over again, but for the handful of stolen minutes that the carriage crosses the length of the park, dangled over tiny figure below, Numbers is almost calm, almost forgets that they aren’t just a normal family, that what waits for them at the end of the line will never be home.

Maybe letting his guard down is his first mistake.

* * *

Wrench still hasn’t adjusted to being on the ground by the time he’s sitting on a hard plastic chair at a Dunkin’ Donuts, drinking watered-down mud out of a Styrofoam cup to stay alert. 

God, he hates this city.

The deal went down uneventfully. It’s the first thing since Numbers put a bullet through one of Reinhardt’s men that’s been uneventful, which means that he’s on edge, waiting for the axe to fall.

It inevitably will—even now, he can feel the gears that grind his plan, the plans of others, forward towards collision—but it doesn’t yet. He’s got $25,000 in a duffel bag and an AR 15 with the serial numbers filed off; he could have done better, if he didn’t have Reinhardt and the DEA, possibly working in concert, breathing down his neck, but it’s a start to getting as far away from here as he possibly can. And yet he can’t move.

He’s exhausted; the coffee isn’t enough to stop him from nodding out, and _she’s_ there in the gaps that sleep doesn’t quite fill. She’s sitting across from him, twirling strands of her long hair, the same dull copper as his own, around a stubby finger. He looks around, but the smattering of junkie detritus lingering under the fluorescent lights don’t notice her. She’s insomnia and wistfulness and too much coffee, not flesh.

_You should come see me while you’re in town,_ she says, except not really. He’s dreaming in blinks and she signs better than she ever did in life, with the same weird little flourishes that Numbers adds to his gestures.

_Fuck that. I’ve been there. You’d fucking hate it._ The stone’s inscription says, no shit, “God’s garden has need of little flowers.” He’d gagged just looking at it. It’s _their_ surname on it, not the one he was given and rejected, the one she kept hidden in a box in her dresser as a reminder of where she came from. _I ever get a break from people trying to kill me, I’m going to buy you a better one._

_It ain’t my grave you gotta visit, big brother._ She won’t look at him. Maybe she’s ashamed. He couldn’t blame her; he is and will always be a bit of a fuck-up. _So you became a hit man. Can’t say I’m surprised. Remember that time Dwayne called me a slut and you tossed him into the bike rack?_

_Those were the days._ He’d been twelve, just coming into his own strength and the understanding that while the entire world was against him, he could at least hit back.

She says: _You can’t outrun this._ He drinks the last of his coffee because she’s not really there, because there’s no need for the worn-out losers occupying the tables around him to see him waving his hands around at an empty chair.

He thinks sometimes about fleeing to Mexico. Maybe Canada, even if Numbers has said he never wants to live anywhere it gets that cold again. Reinhardt’s reach can’t extend that far; his inroads into Juarez are tentative at best, likely curtailed after the El Paso massacre, and he’s never inched too far north either. But that’s why _she’s_ here, to remind him that it ends in fire and blood.

_You didn’t save me,_ she reminds him, the spectral embodiment of—with the exception of the three deep scars on his partner’s body—his greatest failure. _You won’t save them either._

_How the fuck would you know?_ His hands jerk at her; the woman at the counter stares, then shrugs it off. Crazy people twitching at nothing are par for the course in a shithole like this. _You left me._

_Everyone does._ She meets his eyes, then, her gaze wide and green, the same eyes as those Numbers has been drunk enough, on a few occasions, to call fucking beautiful. _Everyone always will._

He’s at the door, and doesn’t fool himself into thinking that when he takes a last glance back, she’ll still be there.

But she is, dead and lovely behind the picked-at ruins of his coffee cup.

_You know what you need to do,_ she tells him. 

* * *

The car is parked off the highway in a rocky stretch of no-man’s land. Once they’ve explained the plan, Olivia lies on her back and looks up at the spray of stars arcing overhead. It’s the last night she’ll get before things are bad again, and though she has no way of knowing this for sure, she’s hyperaware of every cicada call, of the eddy of the smoke from Numbers’ cigarette as it dissipates into black.

“Will we be safe?” she asks. “After?” A question with another—"when it's over, will be be together?"—buried inside it. When neither of them answer—and of course they don’t answer; she might be just a kid but even she knows it’s a dumbass question—she says, “I’ve never seen so many stars before. You can’t see shit from my neighborhood, and it’s not like it’s safe to go out at night.” It isn’t much safer in the daytime, she muses; Reinhardt’s crew hadn’t needed the cover of darkness to massacre Morales’ people, after all. “I’m talking too much. You guys are probably used to how it is out here.” And, though she dare not mention it, neither of them strikes her as the stargazing type. 

Numbers tilts his head towards her. _Never safe,_ he spells out. _Not used to_ — The gesture dissolves halfway through, and his hand flicks back to his cigarette, so she never finds out if he means the brilliant cloak of night sky or this weird, quiet moment where no one’s shooting and there’s no immediate danger. He’s pressed against Wrench’s side, and he seems almost calm, though she can see the glint of the gun concealed under his jacket when he shifts to stub the cigarette out.

Two weeks ago, all she could hope for was her mom being semi-coherent and a bit of pocket money thrown her way if she got Morales’ drugs from point A to point B. Now—stupid as it is—the taste of cotton candy still itching at her back teeth and the fear that after tomorrow she might never see them again a nagging sore beneath her skin, she thinks anything might be possible. 

“This was the best day ever,” she says. “Can you tell him that for me?”

He shows her instead; she mimics the series of gestures even though Wrench nods that he’s understood before she’s done. She doesn’t know how they memorize it all; she can’t imagine that even after years she’d be able to hold the kind of lengthy conversations that they have with each other. She recognizes the gesture for _you’re welcome,_ but also a certain sadness in how he moves, slower than normal as if he’s pushing through water rather than air, the way he keeps staring blankly in her direction like he’s blind as well as deaf, like he knows something she doesn’t. 

“Hey,” she says. “Wanna see something cool?” She waits for Numbers to translate and then holds up her hand, tiny compared to either of theirs, and shows them the thing where she can pop her thumbs in and out of their sockets. She immediately feels like an idiot—they’re running for their lives, even if it doesn’t seem like it at this exact moment, and it’s not even that good a trick—but Wrench nods approvingly, like anything actually impresses a guy who’s probably killed hundreds of people.

Then he bends forward and hugs her, stiffer and more awkwardly than she’d hugged him earlier, but she could still lose herself in his arms and pretend that everything is going to turn out fine. And even though she knows that it won’t be, that after tomorrow she might never see them again, and that somewhere within that iron fortress of a brain he’s picturing holding someone else, she wants the three of them to go on like this forever.

* * *

They don’t. It's all part of the trap that they plan to spring on Reinhardt, but she worries that there's more to it than that.

The bus leaves from the terminal at a quarter to seven. At six, Olivia’s shuffling her feet, chilly in her old jeans and new _Star Wars_ t-shirt and the cheap flip-flops that are already starting to come apart at the soles, the building storm still a rumor lurking in the wind.

The ticket cost nearly $300 and they had to lie and say she was 12 to allow her to travel unaccompanied, and it’ll take almost two days to get to a town she’s never even heard of (and thinks Numbers is spelling wrong, because how do you even pronounce that?) and all of that doesn’t matter because she doesn’t want to leave.

She’s got $5,000 of the money in the bottom of her backpack, more than she's ever had in her life, hidden in socks and underwear like the coke had been, and two addresses scrawled on the last of the hotel stationary. She’s got enough snacks that the backpack feels heavy, and she’s insisted that she’s got money to buy food at any of the four transfers, but for some reason the thought of her going hungry is what drives Numbers into a pique of worry.

And she’s got Wrench’s knife, though it’s little comfort when the DEA and Reinhardt’s men all have guns. But it’s better than nothing.

They’re alone under the brown brick archway that smells a bit like piss, though Wrench keeps pacing, his eyes on the buildings across the street, a Laundromat and a bail bonds place and a store apparently called, “THE FAMOU,” with an ugly red bridesmaid’s dress behind barred windows. They’ve gone over the plan half a dozen times but she repeats it at their insistence.

“I wait until you’re gone,” she says. “I call the DEA—and ask to speak to the guy in charge of the El Paso investigation. Only him. I give him the first address—” This is the bit that she thinks is stupidest; why can’t they just keep running? What if the snitch that they questioned was wrong about the DEA being in Reinhardt’s pocket? “—and then I get on the bus and go to the second address.” She chews on the inside of her cheek. “You don’t have to send me away. What if you need someone to translate?”

Wrench puts a hand to his mouth, shakes his head, and then mimes shooting a gun. It’s clear enough. They’re not planning to do any talking. It still doesn’t make sense, though; it’s not like she hasn’t seen people die before. 

“Did I do something wrong?” she asks, her voice a squeak.

Numbers shakes his head, signs something so rapidly that she can’t even pick out a word. Whatever it is, Wrench looks startled. He points to himself, then Numbers, and then her, and makes the sign for “partner.”

She tells herself that if that’s true, then she can’t cry; she has to be as unbreakable as they are. Her doubts are stupid anyway; she’s got their money, of course they’ll come back for her when they’ve taken out Reinhardt.

But Minnesota is such a long way away. They even showed her on a map, like she didn’t need to memorize all the states in school.

“I’ll practice the alphabet every day,” she promises. “I’ll get books out of the library, and then I can talk to you properly.”

For some reason, Wrench finds this—or whatever Numbers translated her words as—amusing. She lowers her head; she wants to hug him again, but maybe she shouldn’t, maybe that’ll make things irrevocably weird. Instead, she sticks out her hand. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with it at first; he’s no more a handshaking kind of guy than he is a hugging kind of guy. After a pause that goes on longer than it should, he wraps his long fingers around her hand in a grip that’s near-crushing. 

Numbers goes into the trunk and retrieves the pink elephant. She’d honestly forgotten it was there. 

“Keep it,” she says. “You can give it back when you come get me.” 

She heads for the payphone and listens for the sound of the car pulling away before she drops the coins in and dials the number.


	11. Storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing goes as planned, and no one gets what they want.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Animal death, oblique reference to racism and police brutality.

The man in the seat next to Olivia keeps checking his watch. She peeks over his shoulder. The bus should have been moving three minutes ago. Four minutes. Before the second hand can complete another circle, she pushes herself up over the seat blocking her view to see if the bus driver has come back from his coffee break yet.

Four minutes, she tells herself, isn’t very much. She still has time to get clear, even if Reinhardt’s followed the trail they’ve left. She tells herself that Wrench and Numbers know what they’re doing. Reinhardt will go to the location she’s told him about, the warehouse where they’re lying in wait to ambush him, and then it’ll all be over and they’ll be free.

It’s dark outside, too dark for what should be dawn. She hugs herself, bare arms prickled with gooseflesh, and flinches at a clap of thunder.

_Just the rain,_ she thinks as the sky bursts open.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” the man next to her mutters, then apologizes hastily, as if she hasn’t heard worse, as if she hasn’t seen flies dancing across the eyeballs of men. Past him, through the window, two uniformed figures are striding towards the bus.

She scrambles into the aisle, darts past the empty driver’s seat, into the pounding rain.

“Hey,” one of the cops is calling, “stop, hey,” and she keeps running, past the closed shops, past the hulking buses; there’s not a crowd to get lost in, these are men trained to chase, to hunt, but she runs nonetheless. 

One of the cops is faster; he pulls her arms around her back, twists her so she can’t move, and even still she kicks and spits and he’s screaming that he’s not going to hurt her though it already hurts, and there’s a bang that’s not thunder this time, and she’s free.

He’s sliding down against the wall. A smear of red, already diluted by the rain, follows his head as it sinks to his chest.

She has just enough time to think she’s been rescued before she looks up, into the barrel of a gun that a man who can’t be anyone other than Abel Reinhardt is pointing at her head.

“Hello, little girl,” he says.

* * *

“That’s just sick,” Budge says, leaning his forearms up against the wheel. Pepper snaps his seatbelt loose and cranes up at the shambling ruins of the abandoned warehouse. The faded wooden sign beside the door is the latest weirdness conjured by an erratic universe to have captured his partner’s mayfly attention. Painted across once-white plywood is a smiling cartoon pig, the pink of its body turned to shades of brown and grey through years of weathering. Peg-legged, wearing a chef’s hat, it’s proudly presenting a plateful of sliced ham.

Pepper will admit that yeah, it’s in poor taste when you think about it, but he’s got more pressing issues on his mind. There’s a flash of movement at one of the windows, a pale blur that might be his very own personal white whale and might be the reflection of lightning crackling over the horizon. 

On the radio, the dispatcher is warning of inclement weather conditions, a tropical storm branching over six states and flooding out the roads. _No shit,_ Pepper thinks.

“It’s like, ‘come forth, eat of my flesh, see how tasty I am.’” Budge gives his bulletproof vest a once-over and checks the rearview mirror in case their backup is somewhere amidst the curtains of rain. “I just can’t wait to be dismembered.”

“Do you ever stop talking?” Hutchinson asks.

“Sorry,” Pepper says. “He gets nervous when we’re about to plunge headfirst into danger. And by ‘nervous,’ I mean ‘incredibly annoying.’”

“You ever wonder how we get to this point as a culture?” Budge asks, and Hutchinson and Pepper both say, “No.”

“I do,” Budge says. He shrugs and, gun in hand, steps out of the car. The local PD’s arrived; Pepper can just barely hear his words, interspersed with rain: unknown number of armed suspects, possible hostage, extreme restraint and caution, capture alive if possible. He shouldn’t let Budge talk—ever—but he’s consumed with the ramshackle cinderblock bones of the warehouse. Before them stands a door waiting to be opened, the secrets within it pried loose. Closure, after nearly a year of hell.

He just hopes whatever information they get from the syndicate’s men is worth it.

Everyone’s eager to charge in there, of course, a potent mixture of good ol’ boy bloodlust, razor-sharp investigative instincts, and a strong desire to get out of the rain. 

He hears the pop-pop of gunfire; distant, but not distant enough, and not coming from any of them. It’s going to shit, it’s already gone to shit, and even as he’s backing his way towards the side door, he meets Budge’s eyes and both of them _know_.

Hutchinson bellows into a megaphone. Demands the girl’s release. Long minutes of tense silence drip by, and maybe the Fargo hit men are long gone, the warehouse empty. Then one of the yahoos kicks down the door and they stream in like ants, scattering over the dusty floors, and Pepper presses against the wall and presses a thumb to his throbbing temple, waiting for the shooting to start.

* * *

Wrench feels the echo of the fat drops of rain sheeting down through the steel beams and concrete pillars and in the scar tissue inches from his heart, and he watches the sky turn to slate outside windows so ancient that their glass dips and pools in the frames. The heavy, stifling air in the warehouse turns frigid. When he looks down at his hands, his skin is pale, nearly blue in the cold light. 

Wrench can tell Numbers hears something from how he shudders, brow furrowing, like he’s seen through the wall or into the future, how he checks the bullets in his gun. Again.

_Same number as before,_ Wrench signs, and Numbers flips him the finger. 

_This feels like a trap._

_It is,_ Wrench assures him. _Just not for us._

_We shouldn’t have let her go._

If Numbers’ tendency to run hot and cold in equal measure and at unpredictable intervals bothered him, their relationship would never have lasted longer than most marriages. Still—

_Molly will protect her._

_Molly’s not your friend,_ Numbers signs. _She shot you._ _Twice._

Wrench shrugs. It’s not like Numbers himself has never expressed the desire to shoot him. _We’ll do this,_ he signs. _Then drive up to Bemidji and get her back._ He runs a thumb along the side of his partner’s face; Numbers flinches away instinctively first, then leans into the touch, rubbing his cheek into Wrench’s hand like a cat. His skin is fever-hot, and Wrench wants nothing more than to take him up against the graffiti-scarred wall, leaking concrete be-damned.

Instead, he grabs the AR 15 and stalks over to the bowed window to watch the gleaming rush of headlights. He checks his watch. He wonders if the Greyhound left on time.

Numbers makes a sign that’s unmistakable, even in the muddy reverse of the window’s reflection, and Wrench’s lips tighten in an almost-smirk. _I wish,_ he signs. He thinks maybe this car, maybe the next, might be the one, but it’s Numbers who spots it first, just a slight sharpening of the light at the first car’s approach. Numbers taps his back and he knows it’s time.

He doesn’t see Reinhardt at first, but the men climbing out of the cars are definitely not cops, so at least the phone call went to the right people. He’s got no qualms about killing cops but a dead cop means that they’ll never stop looking, and he has plans to slip away, make a new life, once all of this is over. The rain’s coming down hard now, and even outnumbered—there must be a dozen of them already—he and Numbers have done this before. They have cover and he knows the terrain, knows the warehouse and half a dozen escape routes. He steadies his breath. 

Numbers is signing wildly from where he stands by a window at the far end of the wall. Wrench follows him to see another car, sleek and black, pulling up at the other side of the building. He makes the two men that emerge from it for FBI, the same morons who skulked around the restaurant back in Fargo for a few months thinking that the syndicate wouldn’t notice they were under surveillance. The third man, though, he doesn’t recognize, and Wrench wonders if it’s Reinhardt’s DEA buddy, why the fuck he’d even show if he has Reinhardt to do his dirty work for him.

Then he sees the flash of blue and red and he knows it’s going to be a clusterfuck. Reinhardt’s brought out the cops after all, and he means to ensure none of them make it out with his secrets to tell. Poor fuckers probably don’t even know that they’re meat-shields for the man who would be king of the Albuquerque criminal underworld.

_I’ll take that side,_ Numbers signs, and Wrench just wants to hit pause on the whole fucking thing, hold him close and let the walls collapse around them both. Gripped by the memory of what happened the last time Numbers ran off on his own, Wrench gestures wildly at him—fuck strategy, he’s not letting his partner out of his sight—but Numbers is already dissolving into the shadows, the white of his face the last Wrench sees of him before the storm’s onslaught shakes the walls and the doors explode inwards.

* * *

Somewhere close by, she can hear shooting. 

Olivia pushes against the tire where Reinhardt sets her down, struggling to get to her feet. Her hands are zip-tied behind her back, and her shoulders hurt from when the cop restrained her, and beneath the bottom edge of her blindfold, she can make out the shoes of men pacing all around her. The ground is turning to mud; the seat of her jeans sopping already, her t-shirt soggy and clinging to her skin.

She’s gagged, her saliva soaking into the rag, her own trapped breath filling her nostrils. After all this, she’s ended up right where she was supposed to be all along: Reinhardt’s possession, a thing to be used and tossed away once it has been rendered worthless.

Still, she has minutes of value left.

“What the fuck is all this?” she hears Reinhardt demand. “I said local PD, not the fucking Feds.”

“It’s their case.” She hasn’t heard this voice, deeper than Reinhardt’s, amongst his men. “How was I supposed to shake them? What are you _doing_ here?”

She pushes her face into the bumpy surface of the tire, trying to dislodge the blindfold, while she twists her hands, pulling at the zip-ties. “Someone has to make sure these redneck hick fucks don’t fuck everything up.” A pause; his shoes, pacing, squelch through the mud. “You know what’s at stake, Pete. Get rid of the spooks.”

The sodden rag finally rides up on her face enough that she can see the newcomer, a sandy-haired man in dress slacks and a windbreaker, cop written all over him, and she thinks, _I know your face now, asshole, I’ll remember that face forever._ She sees him nod, then look over in her direction. 

“What’s that?” _Pete,_ she thinks, _give me a last name._

“Insurance.” Does they mean her or the men standing guard around her? “The money’s gone. Couple thousand in the kid’s bag and nothing in the car. Those shitbags don’t get to die until they’ve told me where they’ve put it.” 

She hears Pete make a scoffing sound, and she tugs harder, the plastic biting at her wrists. He doesn’t care about the money, she thinks. He cares about whether the man they questioned knew about him, has the last name that she hasn’t heard. Either way, it’s not in his interests to let Wrench or Numbers leave alive. 

She has to get free. She has to get to them.

There are armed cops swarming the building, and the men who saved her life, who said she was their partner and let her ride a rollercoaster and eat all the cotton candy she wanted, who probably think she’s safely on a bus headed miles away and have no idea the hell they’ve brought down on themselves. With the blood roaring in her ears, she’s nearly as deaf as Wrench, the shouts and stomps indistinct above the thud of her own heart.

She is so terribly small, cold and filthy and wet and no match for even one of the men, no real use to anyone at all. 

But still, she bends her thumb backwards as far as it will go, until it pops out of its socket, and she bites back the pain as one contorted, mud-slick hand slips free of the zip-ties.

* * *

Numbers crouches in the doorway of what used to be an office. He tries not to notice the drawer of one of the filing cabinets, which is bent off its track and permanently ajar; instinct nags him to shove it back in—a second or two of brute force is all it would take—but he doesn’t move. He tries not to notice that his back aches, the ghost of a knife impaling him with the slightest movement, that the breath is tight and constrained in his throat. He tries not to pick out strands from the shooting and the screams, once they’ve started, for the unmistakable sound of Wrench’s voice. 

He has a line of sight to the loading bay. Reinhardt’s men are clustered together when they come through, and even he can’t miss at this range; he fires over and over again, praying that at some point his old killer instinct will kick in, that he can give into the echo of bullets until there’s nothing left, until he’s the last one standing. He lived for that, once.

And then he sees her.

Four cars are parked in a row. She’s slumped by the front tire of the one farthest from him, and four of the men are standing guard over her. She’s drenched and huddled with her knees to her chest and her arms pulled behind her back. He catches a glimpse of someone else running around the side of the building.

His knees and elbows violently protesting, he crawls through the dust, moving from concrete pillar to concrete pillar, past the bodies leaking rainwater and blood into the cement floor, the noises of the approaching slaughter echoing into the roof beams. He can do this, he has to do this, for Wrench if not for a child he barely knows, and he has enough time to contemplate the irony that, with all the blood on his hands, the trail of death his passage through the world has left behind, the last thing he’ll probably ever do is go down trying to save a little girl’s life to spare from heartbreak a man who’s lost enough already.

Olivia lifts her head, and the one exposed eye beneath the blindfold meets his across the muddy stretch of no-man’s land between the parked cars and the loading bay doors. Her pupil widens. He raises a finger to his lips, sees her blink in acknowledgment.

Then he throws himself out the door, blasting a path in front of him with his useless, shaking hands.

He gets two of them, lucky shots, both of them; he has to aim high, away from center mass lest he accidentally hit her. They’re laying down semi-automatic fire all around him and he can’t get any closer without being blown to pieces. One of the survivors picks up Olivia and hauls her in front of him, the muzzle of his weapon below her jaw. Numbers holds his fire, his fingers trembling, and watches the driver gun the engine while the guy restraining Olivia jumps into the passenger seat with her still bucking in his arms.

He follows at a run, boots sliding and squelching, the rain so heavy he can barely see the car as it fishtails over the turbulent river of drowning gravel. He fires at the tires until something catches his foot and he staggers and splashes face-first into the road. The stinging pain doesn’t even register over the seizing muscles in his back until he lifts a hand to his face and his fingers come away dripping with blood and muck. He climbs to his knees and watches the taillights retreat towards the highway.

Fucking hell, he needs to get to Wrench, they need to get out of this slaughterhouse _now._ They can worry about the kid later. He staggers for the building’s teeming chaos, its windows alight with muzzle flashes, rocked by megaphone shouting and squealing tires and gunshots, prepared to tear the place apart and kill everything in it until he finds his partner, but before he reaches it, the cacophony falls abruptly silent.

He stands a few feet away, an open target but he can’t summon the willpower to hide. He rubs at one ear; wonders for a split second if it’s a perforated eardrum until the wail of an ambulance siren fills the void that the gunfire has left 

* * *

 

The well-synchronized multi-agency raid, conducted with seamless professionalism by all involved, lasts about as long as it takes for the Lubbock PD to discover that they’re up against more than two gunmen with a hostage. Whatever the syndicate’s planning remains infuriatingly obscure, but there’s gunfire coming from multiple places, across the rusting walkways and echoing through the cavernous wreckage of storage units and tattered plastic sheeting. Pepper can barely make out the movement of shapes, caught in contorted stop-motion by the arc of flashlights, dodging in and out of a myriad of hiding places.

Hutchinson reappears from behind the building and declares the loading bay area clear. Budge signals that he’s going around the back, and Pepper—feeling extraneous—trails after Hutchinson in a search of the storerooms and offices lining one side of the building. 

Hutchinson darts from room to room, quick, precise. He’s watched all the training videos that Pepper half-slept through. Pepper’s fired his gun a grand total of four times in his career—he knows, he filled out the paperwork in triplicate—Hutchinson kicks down doors like he’s auditioning for a fucking reality show. It’s all thunder and chaos and the reek of gunpowder and copper and dust, and Pepper doesn’t even see what Hutchinson is shooting at until he hears someone scream. He thinks, at least, that it’s a some _one_. 

When he was six, playing in the front yard of the townhouse complex, the neighbors’ dog broke loose from its chain and dashed across the street, running straight into the path of an oncoming car. He remembers, even now, the scream of the brakes as the driver tried and failed to stop, the crunch at the moment of impact, but most of all the yelps that the dying animal made as its broken body slid off the bumper and onto the road. 

That’s the closest analogue his brain can supply to the sound he hears once Hutchinson’s gun falls silent. He edges around the corner, gun at the ready in case the assailant isn’t entirely incapacitated.

The door to what looks like it was once the staff’s break room is hanging off one hinge, and the darkness inside is so complete that it takes Pepper’s eyes another moment to adjust. He can just make out Hutchinson standing over what looks like a crumpled shadow, kicking a semiautomatic rifle in Pepper’s direction.

It takes Pepper a second or two to identify the man at Hutchinson’s feet as one of the syndicate’s gunmen, the tall ginger. He’s slumped against the kitchen counter, one long leg splayed in front of him, the denim soaked, from hip to the top of his cowboy boot, in red turned to black in the dim light. Pepper’s about to ask Hutchinson if he’s brought handcuffs when he sees the other agent take aim between the man’s eyes.

“Tell me this ain’t what it looks like.”

Hutchinson doesn’t even turn his head. “Walk away, Agent Pepper.”

“Because it looks to me like you’re about to murder an unarmed suspect.”

The man on the floor twitches, issues another unearthly moan. He’s a cornered animal, wounded but still dangerous, still one lunge away from obliterating them both. Cautiously, wary of Hutchinson’s glassy, thousand-yard stare, Pepper circles closer. He’s playing through scenarios where Hutchinson might want a suspect—this _particular_ suspect, the one who might very well hold the information that would resuscitate Pepper’s career and reputation, the one who knows the location of the kid they’re trying to rescue—definitively dead rather than safely contained and interrogated. None of them make much sense, and he replays every detail he can recall of the DEA agent’s movements, every washroom break that took minutes too long, every unexplained absence and mysterious phone call. 

Where had Hutchinson been a few minutes earlier, when he said he’d been at the loading bay? 

“Self-defense,” Hutchinson says, his tone flat. 

Nothing makes sense, that is, unless Hutchinson is dirty, and the syndicate knows his secrets.

“Step back,” Pepper says, both hands holding his own weapon against one leg, and Hutchinson’s arm swings out and the gun’s pointed at him now. He chuckles uneasily. “You gonna shoot me too?”

“Fog of war, it’s called.” Beneath the sound of gunfire outside, Pepper can barely hear him, and the injured gunman doesn’t even react at all. “Dark room. Dark figure—no offence. Saw a gun, shot before I saw the vest and recognized him.” His voice low and solemn: “A friendly fire incident, a real goddamn tragedy. I’ll send flowers to your wife.” 

Pepper is feinting to one side before Hutchinson’s finger squeezes the trigger; the bullet scrapes the side of his arm where his head had been moments earlier.

What follows is a blur—something hits him in the chest with the force of a shovel, the pain staggering even with the protection of the bulletproof vest. The third bullet, the forth, he loses count; his entire world is a blaze of agony. He hears Budge whisper, as clearly as if he were in the room, _What if we’re already dead?_

He’s still standing, even as the side of his neck explodes into fire; he stumbles against the refrigerator before dropping to the floor, darkness encroaching into the corners of his vision. He’s lost his gun ages ago. He’s going to die on a dirty floor, murdered by a dirty cop to cover his tracks, his reputation tarnished and nothing resolved.

Hutchinson’s loading a new clip. Behind him, Pepper sees the hit man, who’d been motionless a few minutes earlier, crawling across the floor, a streak of blood marking his slow, torturous progress. He’s reaching for the rifle, Pepper thinks, but no, Hutchinson is distracted by something outside the room and the hit man is practically on top of him in a second, pressing a wad of napkins into the wound in his neck. 

_What the actual fuck?_  

He can’t breathe—the pressure on his neck is choking—and he fights him even though a part of his fading consciousness understands that the man, this _killer,_ is trying to save his life. How long does it take to bleed to death? He can’t remember if any of his training covered that. 

Hutchinson’s arguing with someone now, and he sees a stranger brush past him and there’s a struggle of some sort but he’s past that now, fading in and out, and he thinks of how Vi’s face looks when she cries, how he hates to be the person who carves that pain on her face, and when his eyes slide open again the hit man is gone and it’s Budge leaning over him, screaming, “Officer down!” and begging him to hold on.

Funny, it hadn’t occurred to him, until now, that Budge cares.

“Hutchinson,” he croaks, “He’s—”

And then his world goes black.


	12. Wreckage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The guns fall silent. The next 24 hours go as follows...

_He’s back at Oak Park Heights, the phone lodged between his ear and shoulder as he jots down notes. Malvo, shackled and cuffed, is hunting him—he has no illusions; he’s nothing more than prey in this man’s eyes—through glass, an amused half-smile on his face. Without the luxuries of civilian life, the silver wash in his hair and goatee is growing out, brown creeping up at the roots, and it does nothing to lessen Pepper’s impression that what he’s facing is less a human than an Arctic wolf, shedding its winter coat for camouflage before it slinks off into the trees, blood on its muzzle._

_“Are you here to guide me to the other side?” Pepper asks. His hand moves of its own accord, cataloguing an account of regrets, of sins. “Didn’t know I’d done anything that bad.”_

_Malvo laughs through the crackle and hiss of the phone’s headset. “I’m still very much alive, friend,” he says. “So are you. For now.”_

_“Then which one of us is dreaming?”_

_“You’re in a medically induced coma to relieve swelling on the brain,” Malvo says. “And I don’t dream. Never have.”_

_The implication’s there, tapped out on the laminate ledge by Malvo’s trigger-calloused fingers. “There’s no part of me,” Pepper tells him, “that’s anything like any part of you.”_

_“Hmm.” Malvo doesn’t sound convinced, and Pepper’s hand is still writing, the details of those four incidents in which he discharged his firearm in the course of duty—including the time it earned him a commendation. That night in the bathroom at Hennessey’s with Shannon, a month or two after Vi lost the baby. “So why are you here?”_

_“_ You’re _the one in_ my _coma dream, dicksmack.”_

_“You thought you’d find some answers.” Malvo speaks slowly, patiently, a parent tutoring a particularly thick child. “Maybe those two hombres could make sense of it for you. Maybe they were proof that the syndicate wasn’t quite so dead after all, maybe you get to be the one who takes it down for good.” His lips curl back from his teeth, which is almost the same as a smile. “You thought maybe that would make it up to her. Let you both move past all this.”_

_“But I won’t.”_

_“You’re spending your last flickers of neural impulses hallucinating the guy who_ did _take Fargo down,” Malvo reminds him. “There are no answers. No great pattern. Just the rising tide of red, with your own blood flooding the ocean.”_

_“I don’t wanna die,” Pepper says, and how absurd is it to plead to this man, this monster, who has nothing to offer anyone but death, who is—thank God and earnest small-town policewomen—rotting in prison over a thousand miles away._

_“Steppin’ into that_ situation _like you did,” Malvo says. “Coulda fooled me.”_

_“How do I get back?”_

_A little headshake. “Who says you do?”_  

Vi needs me, _Pepper tries to say,_ Budge needs me, _but his excuses fall flat even in the secret corners of his own mind, to the fragment of his own consciousness taunting him with questions he can’t answer. Plenty of people have died despite a burning desire to live. He’s nothing special._

_Hutchinson is going to walk into the branch office tomorrow, his weary smile and cheap suit a mask over the rotting corruption at his core, and Budge is going to shake his hand and accept his sympathies. If Budge is still alive, that is, if Hutchinson didn’t silence him too. The hit men are likely dead, and the Fargo syndicate’s secrets with them._

_He’ll never be able to make sense of it. He will never know why._

_And the girl. Somewhere—and Pepper refuses to believe that she’s yet another one of the victims strewn across the warehouse floor—there’s a child whose life depends on him._

_“Still got a job to do,” Pepper says, and Malvo winks and points two finger-guns at him and then laughs, until there’s nothing left but his laughter, echoing in the dying embers of his mind._

* * *

Vi Pepper takes a moment to compose herself as she steps out of the ICU, into the small waiting room. From the hard plastic chair, Budge watches her pull a Kleenex from her pocket, quickly wipe her eyes, half-turned away from Budge and the huddle of officers from the Lubbock PD, then straighten and walk forward, her shoes near-silent over the polished floor. She wears blue jeans and a paint-splattered t-shirt the way another person might wear a sober suit—the phone call came at 7 or 8 in the morning as she lay in bed trying to force herself to go into the office, and she’d had no time to put on makeup before the car arrived to take her to the airport. She’s been crying and there’s no hiding it, but she remains the very model of an agent’s wife, collected and dignified even in grief.

Budge, for his part, wonders why the local guys even showed up. They don’t know Pepper, and for all anyone knows, some of the bullets that the surgeons have spent the last twelve hours digging out of his partner’s body might have come from any one of their service weapons. Mistakes happen—he more than anyone knows that—and it was a madhouse in there. Still, he wishes they’d fuck off. They’re no help to Vi, or to him.

He rushes to her side, shields her from questions, well-wishing, rubbernecking. “How is he?”

She shakes her head. “Still—” and can’t finish the sentence. Still. That says it all, doesn’t it? She grips his forearms, surprisingly strong. She’s a foot shorter than him and has to crane to meet his eyes.

There’s wordless multitudes behind the wash of tears, he thinks. Terror, of course, and he hopes she knows he’s just as terrified. Anger, that he didn’t have her husband’s back when Pepper needed him. Relief, that Budge alone, out of every law enforcement officer who’d breached the old warehouse doors, hadn’t fired a single shot.

“He’s strong,” one of the cops offers, as if that has anything at all to do with it. “He’ll make it.”

Budge and Vi both turn to glare at him.

“Cafeteria?” Budge asks her.

“Yeah,” she says, the single syllable an exhale of relief.

They end up getting coffee—neither of them have eaten, but nor do either of them have an appetite, not with Pepper upstairs fighting for his life—Budge swigs his down in a gulp or two and ends up etching intricate mandalas into the Styrofoam with his fingernail while she sips at hers, every muscle in her face, her arms, tightly controlled lest she shatter.

“I can’t promise you the heads of the guys who did this,” Budge says.

“Fuck ‘em,” Vi replies. “Anyway, I don’t want anyone’s head.”

“There’ll be an investigation.” He’s not sure if he means it as fact, or reassurance, or pure cynicism. He doesn’t think, in any case, that heads will roll. He figures paid leave, desk duty and retraining, if there are any consequences at all. He’s seen cops—hell, even his own colleagues—walk away in far more damning circumstances.

“I should be doing the investigating.” She tugs at her frizzled hair. “They’ve cut the news department’s budget. If we did allege negligence and the department sued…” Vi is on the business beat anyway—or was; she’s been off work so long that it’s a testament to her talent that they’ve kept her on payroll at all—but Budge doesn’t hate the idea of a _Forum_ reporter poking around, asking the questions he can’t.

“You should—” Another man might have told her that her priority should be her stricken husband, but then again, there’s nothing she can do for him waiting around the hospital. The doctors sound optimistic, for whatever that’s worth. “I don’t know what you should do,” he admits.

“Are you going home?”

He scratches at his chin. “Bureau wants me home,” he says, and this is what’s really unsettling. He’d scoured the warehouse after they’d loaded Pepper into the ambulance, but there’d been no sign of the syndicate’s men among the corpses. Like always, the absence of concrete evidence seems enough to satisfy his superiors. “Thought I’d take a few days off, stick around here, in case you or Webb need anything.” _And keep looking,_ he thinks, but Vi’s a journalist, and from how she nods before he’s even finished the sentence, he’s sure she knows damn well what he’s up to. “How _are_ you holding up?” 

“Well, you know.” She sniffles into her napkin. “Stupid assholes shot my husband. So there’s that.” Vi smiles tightly. She reaches across the table, twines her fingers into his.  “He promised me, when he came down here, that it’d be worth it. He always said you were an all right partner, even if you were a crazy bastard and he didn’t know what you were on about half the time. Make sure it’s worth it, okay?”

“If there’s anyone to nail,” Budge promises, “I’ll nail ‘em.” He sounds tougher than he feels. He feels worn out, useless, perpetually at the edge of grasping some kind of understanding before it’s tugged away from him again. “Crazy bastard, huh?”

“Don’t take it the wrong way,” Vi replies. “Maybe a little crazy’s what we need.”

* * *

_Numbers lies in the snow, and Wrench’s hands are around his neck._

_It’s something out of a fairy tale, his eyelashes black in a face white as the storm that envelops them, red spilling beneath Wrench’s hands. No matter how hard he presses, no matter how deeply he loves, they’re hapless children lost in the woods, to a story that isn’t about them, that will crush them in its stride. Numbers is cold and motionless, and there’s too much blood and never enough time._

_This isn’t how it happened, he tells the dream. Wrench was lying unconscious a block away—it was Numbers who tried to get to_ him _, crawled through the snow until he’d collapsed at Wrench’s side—and besides, Numbers is alive, they shocked his stubborn heart, over and over, until it beat. When Wrench looks down again, it’s the FBI agent he sees, blood spilling between his fingers, pooling under his head. He blinks and it’s Olivia choking under his hands that are killing her as much as they’re keeping her from death._

_He tells himself that she’s alive too, she has to be, and his naïve faith is rewarded because Olivia becomes Crystal, her long copper hair a rusted corona around her head. He’s fighting, and failing, to save her. The left side of her face is a bloody ruin, crimson issuing from her mouth, every bit the horror he imagines the crash left her._

_Her lips (red as fucking blood) move, though her eyes stare sightlessly ahead._ Wake up, big brother, _she mouths,_ time to wake up, _each soundless word a bullet, and he’s burning alive, every nerve incandescent, his eyeballs burning as the white of the snow expands to fill his vision._

_Just when he thinks it’s so bright he can’t bear it, his eyes open for real._

* * *

He snaps back into consciousness with a gasp, rocking the chair he’s cuffed to hard enough that it nearly topples over. The pain catches up with him a split-second later, a splintering agony up the length of his leg, worsened by the bent angle the handcuffs and ropes force him into. If he turns his head, he can see the bloody gauze inexpertly taped over the ragged hole in his jeans. He doesn’t think the bullet broke his femur, but it’s lodged close, a grinding torment that wakens if he so much as breathes too deeply. It hasn’t torn the artery open either, or he’d have bled out on the way to wherever they’ve taken him, and they’ve at least done a half-assed job of patching him up.

They want him alive. Which means they didn’t find the money yet.

Wrench lifts his head as much as his position allows. There’s movement all around him; he can see Reinhardt’s men moving around what he takes for the inside of an office trailer, something you’d find on a construction site. Keeping his eyes down—no use in letting them know he’s awake—he scans the interior of the box for anything that, should he manage to somehow get himself out of the cuffs, he can use as a weapon.

Olivia’s similarly tied up—zip ties rather than handcuffs—in the corner, with a bag over her head. There’s no sign of Numbers. He must have got away, Wrench thinks, or he’s dead, and since he can’t bring himself to contemplate the latter, he can still hold out hope for a rescue. 

The noise of the chair must have alerted Reinhardt’s muscle that he’s up, because there’s suddenly a man screaming in his face, close enough that the spittle from his mouth hits Wrench’s cheek, waving a Taser around. He only catches a word or two but it’s easy enough to imagine what’s being said. The man checks his handcuffs, and Wrench catches one of his fingers under the chain and twists as hard as he can until he can feel something pop and collapse.

It’s not much in the way of revenge, and it’s short-lived. The man whips around and pain rips through him again, radiating from his belly outwards, every muscle in his body seizing and stiffening. He feels a scream tear itself free from his throat. It’s all-encompassing, obliterating; he’s aware of nothing beyond the countless bright sparks searing through his skin, turning his bones to ash.

It’s over just as quickly, the convulsion ebbing away, leaving him dizzy and disoriented. His torturer turns the Taser over in his hands—were it not for the grimace of pain at his broken finger, Wrench would think he was admiring it—and Wrench sucks in a ragged breath, makes out, “just beginning,” on his lips. 

He slumps against the chair and reacquaints himself with the pressure of the cuffs, the bone-deep throb of his wounded leg. He’s been shot before—and Tased, for that matter—and he tells himself that he can survive this, that he has to.

Reinhardt moves into his field of vision. They’re having some sort of disagreement. Wrench thinks he recognizes, “deaf” and “idiot” amongst the various admonitions, and then his former employer is kneeling in front of them so they’re eye-to-eye.

“Can you understand me?” Reinhardt asks.

“Fuck you,” he tries to form, with no idea as to whether any sound came out. Numbers used to tell him he pronounced it, “ock ewe,” which was hardly encouragement to speak more often. 

Reinhardt gets the point, though, and he holds out his hand so that his henchman—what kind of pretentious fuck has _henchmen,_ who does he think he _is?_ —can drop the Taser into it. The other man looks pained, wringing his injured hand. _Good._  

“—know you can handle this,” Reinhardt is—probably—saying. “—taste of…do to her.” In case it isn’t abundantly clear, he waves a hand towards Olivia. He’s asking about the money. Wrench thinks he catches something about Fargo. On a scale from Mr. Tripoli (big mouth and a tendency towards the monosyllabic) to Mr. Jergen (Numbers claimed that even with perfect hearing, nothing the man said was remotely comprehensible), this guy’s somewhere in between, which means that Wrench can decipher about every third word out of his mouth.

It’s enough to piece his situation together. The DEA agent wanted him dead because Wrench can expose his connection to Reinhardt’s crew, and he’d been willing to kill one of his own to keep that secret. Reinhardt stopped him from blowing Wrench’s brains out because he thinks he’s going to be able to torture the location of the money out of him. It’s a fuck of a lot of effort for what’s less than 50 grand at this point, but Reinhardt’s still establishing his status as a big fish, he still probably thinks that it’s some huge Fargo conspiracy to rip him off, and besides, Wrench has killed people for far less. 

“Talk,” Reinhardt barks, and Wrench pushes forward in the chair enough to slam their heads together. It hurts, and there’s no point, but at least he has the consolation of watching Reinhardt reel, stunned.

Reinhardt rubs at his forehead. The shock receding, he eyes Wrench carefully, deliberately, then kneels again, his hand on Wrench’s knee. He gets, “keep,” and “alive,” and “time,” and strings the rest together. Reinhardt, expressionless, pushes his thumb into the gauze covering his wound. Wrench hisses into the pain, stars blacking out the corners of his vision—he should be passing out, there has to be a limit to how bad it can get—but he won’t give Reinhardt the satisfaction of another scream.

“Fucking hopeless,” Reinhardt says. He stalks over to the corner where Olivia’s tied up and yanks the bag off her head. Wrench bristles and kicks against the chair with his good leg despite the jolt it sends through the injured one. His captor stills him with a hand to his chest and a sneer, a promise of more pain to come. 

_Just come a bit closer, asshole,_ Wrench thinks. _You’ve got nine too many working fingers left._

Reinhardt marches the girl over to him, her hands still tied behind her back, and Wrench is gripped with a sudden panic. If he _touches_ her…

He works at steeling his expression. Reinhardt can’t possibly know about Crystal, and for all he knows, Olivia could just be a convenient hostage rather than a weapon that can be used against him with far more effectiveness than guns and Tasers. As long as Wrench doesn’t let on, she’s nothing but slightly valuable property that’s now been returned to her owner.

Reinhardt’s talking to her, and she’s shaking her head, protesting even as he cuts the zip ties off her wrists, before fixing him with her big dark eyes.

_Okay?_ she signs. He tries for a pained grin. _He wants the mon—_ she spells out; he nods that he’s got it, as if it isn’t obvious why he’s still breathing.

“—needs his hands free to sign,” Olivia’s saying. Reinhardt rolls his eyes and there’s multiple guns behind pointed at his head, not to mention the Taser, before Reinhardt unlocks the cuffs. He considers, very briefly, flinging himself across the floor and seeing how much damage he can inflict with his ankles still tied to the legs of the chair, but the strength is sapped out of him; every molecule of his body is deflated, thrashed to shit.

_Numbers?_ Wrench signs.

_Got away,_ Olivia replies, and the tight knot of dread uncoils by increments with each letter.

_You okay?_

She shrugs, glances up at Reinhardt.

“Ask him where—” Reinhardt is saying, and Wrench looks away because every gangster he’s ever met, save Numbers, is boring and predictable.

She obediently spells it out; before she can get to the second E, he reaches a hand out and stills her wrist. Reinhardt’s eyes narrow and the goon with the broken finger shifts from foot to foot, though he can’t tell whether it’s to distract himself from the pain or from the sheer boredom at the speed of their communication.

They won’t hurt her, he decides. There’s no reason to, and she’s worth more to them in one piece. They don’t have Numbers. Crystal, hovering in the corners where his mind is already fragmenting under the strain, is far beyond their ability to harm.

_Up his mother’s ass._ Olivia grins and relays it, and he has about four seconds where he gets to watch Reinhardt’s face twist from frustration to rage before he’s on the floor, his leg bent under him where it’s bound to the metal chair, his entire body one continuous scream until it’s shocked and kicked and beaten back into merciful unconsciousness.

* * *

The steady beep that reminds Budge that Pepper is stable despite the Darth Vader ventilator mask and the bleak skyline of medical equipment, is oddly soporific, suspending him in a dull twilight. Every so often he jerks completely awake, convinced that Pepper has moved or woken up or died, that Vi is back and shouting at him for falling asleep when he’s supposed to be keeping a grim vigil over her husband while she catches a few precious minutes of sleep in the waiting room. He’s been up for 40 hours. He’s not even sure if he’s actually awake, if the warehouse and the hospital and maybe even Fargo itself is just a dream.

When the door opens, though, it’s Hutchinson, the strain visible in the fine lines carved into his face. He’s got a cardboard tray with coffee from the hospital cafeteria; Budge accepts his cup wordlessly and sits back down to watch his partner’s grey face remain unchanged from one instant to the next. 

“You need a break?”

Objectively, Budge knows he does, but he shakes his head. “We’re not even supposed to be here,” he says. “The Bureau pretty well closed the book on Fargo. And us. This was just…” _An act of desperate hope,_ he doesn’t say. _A saving throw to redeem our careers._ They were supposed to be in the archives, forever, filed away safe. It had even started to feel like home.

“Some of the boys are taking up a collection,” Hutchinson offers, and Budge gives a dark little laugh in response. 

“Thanks,” he says. “He’ll appreciate that. When he—”

“Look,” Hutchinson says, and maybe it’s the sleep deprivation making him paranoid and edgy, but Budge thinks he looks nervous. “There’s been no sign of any of them; they might have packed up and lit back for Albuquerque for all we know.”

_Give up,_ Budge thinks. And he’s tired enough that it’s tempting. Maybe he’ll apply to teach at Quantico. He doesn’t have much in the way of family back in Fargo; a move wouldn’t be a big deal. He’ll always have the shadow of failure hanging over his head, but it’s not like anyone at the Bureau liked him much to begin with. He could leave law enforcement altogether, and no one would miss him.

“I’m heading back tonight,” Hutchinson says, and makes it sound like a question. A challenge. Budge is too busy dissecting the particulars of his appearance—shit, there’s nothing better to do—how he hasn’t slept either, how he’s taken a shower but missed a spot of blood under his ear, to remember how a person with normal social skills might respond to that. Budge is just waiting—for him to leave, for Vi to wake up, for Pepper to—submerged under an endless flood of half-baked theories and suspicions. 

Eventually Hutchinson does, shaking his head. Eventually Vi does, and tells Budge to go back to the motel and get some sleep. Pepper isn’t going anywhere.

Budge promises—without any intention of following through on that—and steps out into the hallway. 

It’s quiet, well past visiting hours, but given the ongoing nature of the investigation and the fact that there are suspects still at large, the hospital’s being accommodating. The hall, but for the nurses at the monitoring station and an old man in a stretcher who appears to have been forgotten there, is practically deserted. Budge feels like the last guy standing after the zombie apocalypse has blown through.

At the very far end of the corridor, the elevator doors slide open. What emerges is a half-drowned sewer rat, limping towards Budge and trailing rainwater behind him. He’s chalk-pale and fraying at the edges, and—this is, in the end, what will make Budge do something incredibly stupid in the next five minutes—holding a pink elephant that’s as waterlogged as he is.

Budge stands face-to-face with the hired killer he’s been chasing in one way or another for over a year. The man, who smells like he’s spent the night swimming in a giant ashtray flooded with the dregs at the bottom of several different kegs of cheap beer, stares at him and says nothing.

“Well, shit,” Budge says. “I’ve been looking everywhere.”


	13. Honor Among Thieves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Wrench and Olivia fight to stay alive, Budge and Numbers find unexpected common ground.

Here is what you do when a man wanted in four states, whose last few weeks have resulted in a body count in the double digits, and who is very possibly holding a young child hostage, walks into the hospital where your partner is on life support.

You arrest him, dumbass. Then you get the truth out of him one way or another. There’s no ambiguity here; disgraced or not, you are an officer of the fucking law, and _lives are at stake_.

Here’s what Budge actually does.

“You’d better come with me.”

The hit man glowers, his shoulders hunching as he reverts to fight or flight mode, and Budge—raising his hands, the last thing he needs is for things to turn violent—has a few seconds of wondering if he’s made a horrible mistake. Then he slumps into the wall, the elephant dripping a puddle into the floor that pools around his shoes. Budge doesn’t know his name, doesn’t know what compelled him to walk straight into the path of the man who’s been hunting him, but they recognize something in each other nonetheless. Maybe it’s defeat or pain or sheer fatigue that suggests a certain commonality, the overwhelming sense that they’ve both reached the end of their respective roads.

“If I was going to arrest you,” Budge adds, “I’d do it here. Publicly. Where you might have a harder time shooting me.” 

He starts walking. The hit man clumps heavily after him.

It’s possibly the stupidest move he’s ever pulled—including the time he paid more attention to Pepper’s sandwich and the inexplicable mysteries of houseplant cultivation than to a deranged killer massacring 22 people under his nose—but he ends up driving the guy back to the motel. The hit man doesn’t speak the whole time. He leans his head against the window, closes his eyes, the bubblegum pink of the giant toy absurdly bright against his black jacket. At one point, Budge thinks he’s asleep, but when he looks again, the hit man is watching him with hooded eyes that give nothing away.

He and Pepper have a room—shared, thank you budget cutbacks—on the second floor, still rented out for another night. He doesn’t exactly like the idea of spending a night with a killer in the next bed, but he also doesn’t want his sole lead to slip away. He gestures vaguely at the bathroom. “Go clean yourself up,” he says. “You smell like the ass end of a sewer.” He roots through his suitcase for a rumpled t-shirt and sweatpants that look like they’ll fit.

The guy gives him another death glare but he takes the clothes, drops the elephant on what had been Pepper’s bed, and disappears for longer than is strictly speaking necessary or comfortable. Budge digs around for his gun. Holds it in his lap as he sits on his bed and loses a staring contest to the elephant’s frozen cartoon eyes.

When the hit man emerges again, the scent of the over-perfumed motel soap that clings to his skin is a clear improvement over the stale beer he’d apparently been rolling around in before. He sits down on the bed, tattooed arms crossed, and watches Budge right back. He’s still not said a word, and Budge hasn’t seen a gun—though he probably has one hidden somewhere—but he manages to be utterly terrifying nevertheless.

The standoff lasts a few minutes. Budge realizes that he’s expecting the other man to start. When he doesn’t, he says, “I’m Agent Budge, but you probably knew that. What’s your name?”

The corner of his mouth lifts, as if to say, _Really?_  

“Well, what do I call you?”

He raises his hands, then shakes his head, apparently thinks better of it, and rifles through the nightstand drawer. He comes up with a Bible and a 1980s paperback romance novel, but nothing to write on. Budge sighs, finds his notebook and a pen, and hands it over. 

The hit man writes, _Mr. Numbers._ Then, _Your DEA friend is bent._  

Budge raises an eyebrow. “That so?” He stands up, squinting at the paper from a higher angle, and rips the leaf free. “Talk.” 

Mr. Numbers— _seriously?_ —makes a soundless little laugh, and points to the tattoo on his throat that Budge had, up until now, been nobly trying _not_ to gawk at. It’s not exactly artfully done, and it covers a jagged scar that puckers in and out where it’s laced around his neck, and _shit,_ Budge remembers that the doctors in Duluth had said that he’d probably never be able to speak. Come to think of it, they said he probably wouldn’t survive at all.

“Why come to me?”

Numbers grabs Budge’s sleeve and tests the quality of the material between thumb and forefinger. Stares at his tie disapprovingly, then his shoes. Budge looks down. There’s nothing wrong with his shoes. They were on sale. Pepper might have raised an eyebrow at his socks, which have little cartoon hearts on them; hell, he wishes Pepper were here to make fun of his socks instead of this homicidal fashion critic. 

 _U are not taking payoffs._ Budge is pretty fucking sure the guy just _winked_ at him.

“What’s Fargo’s deal with Reinhardt? Why were you after him?” Numbers looks confused, and Budge adds, “We know you work for the syndicate.” Belatedly, he notices that he’s included his absent partner in the discussion. 

Numbers starts writing, frantically, and Budge resists the urge to look over his shoulder, still half-convinced that the wary animal skulking in his motel room is going to whip around and bite. When he’s finished, he tears off the paper and shoves it at him.

_Reinhardt has a small army and at least 1 mole in the DEA. I can’t take him out alone. He has my partner, my kid, and my money. You want to close your investigation, help me get them back._

If that were the case, Budge thinks, the syndicate would send backup. Two options remain—either they can’t (in which case, they’ve been given the runaround, Pepper’s been shot, maybe _killed,_ for nothing, and he can’t let his brain go there) or Numbers is up to something they wouldn’t like. 

He takes a gamble. “You’re lying about two things.”

Numbers bristles, like it’s taking him considerable effort not to just attack. Or bolt. 

“He doesn’t have your money,” Budge says. “Because if he did, I don’t think he’d have much use for your partner. And whoever’s kid that is, it ain’t yours.” He sighs. He’ll get nowhere by being confrontational. “How do you know Hutchinson’s dirty? You have evidence?” Numbers nods. Budge feels physically ill; the hit man has every reason to lie, but then, if he’s lying, why track down Budge at all?

The warehouse, after, was littered in spent shell casings. The caliber of the slugs they pulled out of Pepper’s body matched those the local cops were carrying. They match the ones in Hutchinson’s gun as well. After the dust settles, there’s not much to distinguish a friendly-fire tragedy from a cover-up.

“The rest of the PD?” 

Numbers shrugs. He doesn’t know. Budge swallows hard, not sure if he’s ready to step into this particular rabbit hole. 

“Are you telling me,” he asks, his voice steady, “that they shot my partner to hide something?”

Numbers writes, _Drugs, girls, $$$._ He flops down on the bed and groans, one arm splayed over his eyes. 

“Hey,” Budge says. “And _your_ partner?”

Numbers reaches for the notepad again. _They can beat him up all they want. He can’t tell them anything._

Budge mentally goes over the details of the various police reports. There must be a certain utility, from a criminal’s perspective, of having underlings who can’t speak, despite the obvious inconvenience when trying to communicate with them. “Because he doesn’t talk, right? He’s deaf.”

 _He doesn’t know._  

“You’re the one who has the money? Then you could have just—taken off. Couldn’t you?”

If Numbers’ eyes could shoot literal daggers, Budge would look like a fucking porcupine. But he also notices that they’re bloodshot, red-rimmed. His handwriting is sloppier from the angle he’s writing at. He’s tired, probably still drunk and falling apart, and that would make him easier to question if Budge had ever missed a chance to snatch defeat from the laws of victory.

He starts to write something, quickly scribbles it out. Finally, he lifts up the book from the nightstand, and Budge sees the embossed script over a torrid illustration. _Honor Among Thieves._  

For a career criminal, Numbers has a terrible poker face.

“Who’s the girl, then?”

Jagged, shaky, like he’s written it in a moving car: _How do u know she’s not my kid?_  

Budge isn’t a bigot. He tells himself that it’s Numbers’ obvious desperation about his partner’s whereabouts and not the earlier dig at Budge’s fashion sense that tips him off and makes him temporarily forget about Things You Definitely Shouldn’t Say To the Contract Killer Stashed In Your Motel Room. “I’m just having a really hard time imagining you having sex with a woman.” 

Numbers glares, then shakes his head and snorts. _Wouldn’t believe me._ His eyes slide towards shut; he tosses the notebook on the bedside table and plants his face in the pillow.

Budge tries again. “What’s the syndicate’s angle?”

A middle finger shoots up from the shadowy lump on the bed, accompanied by a too-quiet groan.

“Okay,” Budge says. “You don’t need to be an asshole.” When there’s no further response—the man’s slipped in to some kind of drunken semi-coma—he adds, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

Budge falls asleep reading case files, and dreams of falling through ice, into endless dark.

* * *

Her hands are asleep when Reinhardt pulls her to her feet, buzzing with tiny needles and just shy of pain. She could slip out of the zip ties, but he’s got a gun, and it would be over fast, and badly. If Wrench were awake, if she could slip the handcuff keys out of the pockets of the man guarding him, she might have a chance. But Wrench is slumped forward in the chair, his face caked with blood, and if she couldn’t hear the whistle of breath through his nostrils, she’d think they’d killed him.

“Where’re we going?” she asks. “You need me. How else are you gonna talk to him?”

“He knows what we want. He can write it down.”

 _You won’t get the money,_ Olivia thinks. _He’ll outlast you._ Which is kind of scary in itself, because while Wrench is the toughest person she’s ever met, he’s still human. She once saw a kid get shot in a convenience store holdup. He hadn’t wanted to go to the hospital, insisting he was fine, and she heard that he died from an infection agonizing days later, holed up in someone’s basement hiding from the cops. Wrench won’t give up anything, but he could easily die keeping silent. 

He puts a bag over her head again. She counts everything—her steps to the car, the seconds and minutes and turns they make, the number of stops, the distance up a graveled driveway to a front door, until she’s standing in the living room of a suburban bungalow, light filtering in from the boarded-up windows.

There are three bedrooms in the house. All of them lock from the outside.

She’s fated to spend the rest of her days, at least until she’s too old to be useful to them, cooped up in one of the rooms with three other girls, two to a bed. They’re all older than her, maybe sixteen or seventeen. One speaks neither English nor Spanish; another one looks drugged to the gills.

The last one gives her the orientation speech, such that it is. She tunes half of it out. She’s been in a place like this before and this is where she was always going to end up. Roller coasters and giant pistachios and the spread of stars above the canyon were only a momentary diversion. 

The other girl snaps her fingers in front of Olivia’s eyes. “Hey. You think you’re better than us? Better—” gesturing at the girl in Daisy Dukes lying on the thin filthy mattress, scars dotting her bare arms, “—than _her_?” 

Olivia, sensing an impending beatdown, shakes her head quickly.

“What, then?”

“My friends,” Olivia says, her tongue drying out on the sentence. Can she even call them that? “They’ll come for me.”

The girl laughs, acidic. “You can keep thinking that,” she says. She walks over to the battered wooden dresser and finds a shirt, flimsy and scarlet and covered in sequins. She holds it up to Olivia, then shakes her head and returns it to the drawer. “For awhile. Until it’s a week, a month. Until the beatings start, and you tell yourself you do what you gotta to survive. Just this once, and every time after that.” She pulls out a tube top next. It’s hideous. “Until you know they never cared enough.”

 _They did before,_ Olivia tells herself. _They’ll come back. You’ll see._ And then she remembers Wrench, seizing on the floor, the sound of his screaming when she hadn’t even known he had a voice.

“What the fuck do you know?” Olivia spits back, and her own words hang there in the stagnant air of the bedroom, unanswered.

* * *

“So I made some calls.” 

Budge, throwing clothes and files into a suitcase, is on the phone with Vi for the second time today. She shrugs off the preliminary status report (no change, the doctors say any minute now, any _second_ ) in favor of enlisting herself in the effort to nail Hutchinson to the wall. 

“I don’t even think you could subpoena his financial records,” she’s saying, “but he just bought a new house and a new car. Got that from the office assistant. Which is funny because a few years ago, she said, he was in some kinda financial hot water. Family problems. Oh, and get this. His branch has gone from busting down doors of small time weed dealers to taking down two multinational operations. Got his boss some big award from the Attorney General.”

He repeats what she’s said under his breath, but louder than he should, interrupting his packing frenzy to scribble down notes.

“Bill,” Vi asks. “There someone with you?”

“Uh.” He glances up. Numbers is sprawled out on the bed, peering at him over the embossed cover of the tattered romance novel. “Yeah. Someone’s, uh, helping me with the case.”

“Local PD? Bill, be careful, we don’t know how deep this thing goes.”

Fleetingly, he pictures Numbers in a police uniform, and fails to suppress a smirk. “Not exactly. Look, I’m going to head out. I don’t like Hutchinson running around unsupervised in Albuquerque. You keep digging—use your maiden name, if they suspect something, Webb’s not safe—and tell him—” Numbers is flat-out staring at him now, which, what else is he going to look at in here, but it’s more than a little unnerving. “I’ll call you tonight.”

Numbers is writing something as Budge hangs up. _Show me Reinhardt’s financials._

“ _Hell_ no. I don’t even have most of ‘em, but even if I did…” 

_He was going legit. Had property._

“Yeah, Albuquerque Realtor of the Year. Think I could bust him for tax evasion?” But he _should_ go over it again; Hutchinson was dealing with that, and Hutchinson’s almost definitely crooked. Maybe there’s something he missed. “How do you know about this stuff?”

Numbers considers it briefly, then writes, _Was going 2 rip him off 4 a lot more,_ glances at the novel again before adding, _I was cooking books when I was still in high school. Family business._

Budge raises an eyebrow. “You are not at all what I expected.”

Numbers shrugs and goes back to his book.

“C’mon, get up. We need to be out of here soon if we’re going to beat the traffic.” Budge has no idea how the man’s moved from “prisoner” to “temporary partner” in his head, but the shift’s happened. Numbers trudges after him at a glacial pace, though whether it’s from a hangover or recalcitrance or physical pain, he can’t tell.

He gives the room a once-over, sure he’s forgotten a toothbrush or a crucial piece of incriminating evidence, and he’s about to leave when something occurs to him.

“Uh, Numbers?” The name feels unwieldy on his tongue for all that he’s used to having a partner whose names are both proper nouns. The hit man grunts at him. Budge opens his laptop. A few minutes of fiddling brings up text-to-speech software that he vaguely remembers activating by accident when he’d first received the computer. He’s kicking himself for not having thought of it last night, when Numbers had been drunk and potentially more pliant. “Don’t even think about poking at anything else on there,” Budge says, the very picture of a serious FBI agent who plays it by the book and does not enlist organized criminals to help him with his investigations, “that’s government property.” 

He’s rewarded for his own cleverness by having to listen to the hit man forcing the laptop’s speakers to say, “fuck you” in each one of the system’s voices. Because the only thing worse than a road trip with a serial killer is a road trip with a serial killer who’s eight years old.

When Numbers looks up again, his face is inscrutable. Budge isn’t so naïve to think that the first utterance of synthesized voice from him was going to be a heartfelt thank you for breaking down the wall of silence he’s been living behind for nearly a year. He’s startled, though, when he does get a little nod in response.

“I still have a lot of questions for you,” Budge says. “We can talk on the road.”

The laptop under one arm and the ridiculous elephant clutched in the other hand, Numbers follows him out to the car.

* * *

To Budge’s utter lack of surprise, the hit man proves to be largely incommunicative for the first hour of the drive, opting to conserve the laptop’s battery in favor of the book he’s reading. There’s an accident on US 84 just past Sudan and it’s backed up both ways. The storm might have broken the heat wave, but even with all four windows rolled up and the AC blasting, the sun beating through the glass turns the car into a greenhouse.

“You know they have artificial voice boxes, right?” Budge says, wiping sweat from the top of his head with his sleeve. “You’d sound like Stephen Hawking. Your old boss could have sprung for one.”

Numbers indulges him with a withering stare. It’s pretty clear that even before their falling out, Reinhardt hadn’t given two shits about the guy. Budge isn’t inexperienced with organized crime circles; the smart bosses look after their employees and extract some kind of loyalty in return. Otherwise, the hired guns turn on each other and run off with the money. As far as he knows, that kind of thing never went down with the Fargo syndicate, unless that was what the mess with Malvo was about.

“Good book?” he tries. _Make a connection with the suspect_ , Budge thinks, _help him see you as a person._

Numbers shrugs. He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d be into romance novels. That’s the bit they don’t tell you when you start out, that the bastards you hunt down have lives outside of what they do. Some of them even have families. Lovers. Kids. Numbers practically vibrates next to him, a wiry bundle of nervous energy. 

“What’s it about?” 

He gets no response.

Ten minutes later, Budge says: “You know that a rat’s teeth never stop growing? He has to keep chewing constantly, wearing them down, otherwise they’ll keep growing right through his brain and kill him. It’s true.”

Numbers scratches at his beard and makes another quiet, noncommittal noise. It would suck, not being able to talk, all the thoughts stuck inside you fighting each other in a mad scramble to be freed.

“Do you think they know?” Budge speaks more to the air than to the curmudgeonly murderer standing in for his missing partner; anything to fill the silence. “Do you think it keeps them up at night? Gotta keep chewing, gotta keep chewing…”

Numbers sighs and, with apparent difficulty, bends down to open the laptop. He types for a few seconds, and then a mechanized voice—the one that sounds like a space alien—says, “ _It’s about a dashing highwayman who lives a life of crime until he falls for a girl from the local village. Poor and gorgeous. Flowing red hair. Huge tits. You a tit man, Agent Budge?_ ” He accompanies it with a gesture that Budge chooses to ignore. Numbers switches voices; when he types again, the words come out sounding like a man with his balls in a vice and a bad head cold. Who programs these things? “ _Then she’s kidnapped as ransom, and he gives up the money and the whoring to rescue her._ ”

“Who’s the kid, Numbers?”

“ _My partner’s._ ”

“Bullshit.”

“ _Why are you still chasing Fargo?_ ”

“The case is still open.”

“ _Bullshit._ ”

“Are you on the outs with them too?”

Numbers hesitates and looks like he’s about to write something, then thinks better of it. “ _When this is over,_ ” a woman’s voice, stilted, says from the speakers, “ _I’ll give you everything I have on them._ ” 

When it’s over, Budge tells himself, Numbers and his partner are going to spend the rest of their lives rotting in jail, but there’s no use in antagonizing 50% of his extant allies. Numbers must know that—he may be a thug, but he’s not an idiot—but he goes back to reading. He’s a dangerous man. Budge is in the wind as far as the Bureau’s concerned; Numbers could grab the gun he must be concealing somewhere and it’d be days before anyone would find the body. Maybe it’ll come to that, in the end.

He’d never be so presumptuous to believe that he’s done the right thing. He’s not even sure there _is_ a right thing. “What happens,” he asks, “at the end of the book?”

A singsong tripping over the words, emphasizing all the wrong syllables: “ _Bodices get ripped. True love prevails.”_ His smile shows more teeth than Budge would like, and doesn’t meet his eyes. “ _Not very realistic._ ”

“No,” Budge says, “guess it’s not,” and turns his attention back to the road.

* * *

There’s a stain on the edge of the carpet that Wrench focuses on in an increasingly useless attempt to distract himself from the pain. Sweat, reddened, drips from his hairline, catches in the cracked corners of his mouth. He’s lightheaded—blood loss and dehydration, and it’s too easy to slip into memory, to confuse the hazy, amorphous present with sharper recollections of the past. If he were anyone else, between the disorientation and the unrelenting grind of the bullet against nerve and bone, he’d have given up everything he knows hours ago. But his tongue doesn’t slip that easily.

 _That’s why they put up with you,_ he remembers Numbers saying after some job gone wrong. _They think you’ll stay silent when shit goes down._  

Wrench had grinned. _You know better_.

Reinhardt is back, mouth twisting into exaggerated shapes that he probably thinks make it easier for Wrench to discern. He guesses it’s about the money again. Maybe Fargo’s involvement—as though no one, not even a competitor, can fathom the existence of a syndicateless world or the idea that he and Numbers might have actually struck out on their own, with their own agenda—and the whereabouts of his partner. 

He wishes he actually knew the answer to the last one. He imagines Numbers has found himself some bar, drinking more than he should and sleeping less, passing the time with strangers in filthy men’s washrooms.

That would be the better option. Wrench makes at least six guys in and out of the trailer at all times, not including Reinhardt. There was a time when Numbers would have been a match for all of them at once, in those halcyon days before Duluth. He’d have been fine in the first place if it wasn’t for Wrench’s sentimentality. They’d still be free, and together, if Wrench could only just learn to cut his losses.

“Write,” he says, taking it on faith that he’s been understood. He hasn’t had to talk so much in years. Reinhardt gets it, though, and frees one of his hands.

_Girl?_

“Gone to her new home.” Wrench doubts he means a loving family. It takes all his self-control not to lash out for Reinhardt’s jugular.

 _Interpreter_.

“I can fucking read.” He says something after that; Wrench looks away, ignores the stinging slap that accompanies it, makes Reinhardt have to actually lift his face.“…deal…you and her, anyway?” 

He writes, _proof of life, then $._ Reinhardt no doubt recognizes a stall when he sees one. He leers, and if it’s the last thing Wrench does, he’s going to tear that fucking smile off his former boss’s face. 

They were so close. They’d underestimated Reinhardt, his resources and ambitions, but they’d almost won. Crystal wavers in the corner of his blurring vision, waiting for him to join her, the first and greatest of all his fuck-ups. His hands, bound once more, move in constant, unseen apology.

They’ll kill him, and they’ll tear the girl to pieces just like they did to his sister, but they’ll never find the fucking money. That small victory he can keep for himself. They’ll kill him, but they won’t break him, and they won’t get to Numbers. 

The thought calms him, pushes the pain somewhere remote and meaningless. At least, he thinks, they had these last few months. They’d done something good, or tried to. He longs for his partner—wants him here, misses his hands and his tongue and his cock, misses the warm weight of him in his arms—and prays that he’ll keep running, that he’s smart enough to stay the fuck away. 

He doesn’t notice Reinhardt slipping out the door.

* * *

“ _Seventeen days,_ ” the computer says, flatter than the news anchor reporting on flooding in South East Asia. In the blue cast of the television screen, Numbers looks submerged himself, drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and smoking yet another addition to the stale cigarette air that permeates the room. 

“Huh?” 

They’ve spent the day staking out what Numbers claims are Reinhardt’s various properties and haunts, but they can’t show their faces anywhere, and it’s not like Numbers has any friends in Albuquerque. They end up in yet another stuffy motel room to lie low until night falls and they can get a closer look. The Bureau’s been calling all afternoon, though whether about expenses or his whereabouts, Budge would only know if he’d actually bothered to answer the phone. If it was about Pepper, Vi would be the one calling.

If he fucks this investigation up, Budge thinks, if it’s all running around in circles with questionable methods, he’ll be too toxic for Quantico to touch, let alone the Bureau.

“ _That’s how long it takes._ ” Numbers is back to using the default voice, like he’s finally too tired to dick around. “ _To forget I don’t need to have captions turned on when he’s not here._ ”

“You timed it?”

“ _I fucked around._ ” He sits up, grimacing, against the headboard. “ _Left a lot._ ” He rubs at his collarbone, the top of the lettering visible above the frayed fabric of his borrowed t-shirt.

Budge knew he’d signed up for a lot of weird shit when he joined the FBI, but listening to a drunken, mute hit man pour out the woeful saga of his love life through his work laptop's speakers was not what he’d bargained on.

“I miss my partner too,” he offers, the words barely out of his mouth before he can regret them. “Webb was the only person who ever tolerated my shit.”

When Numbers raises the bottle to his lips again, he keeps his middle finger outstretched, and Budge can actually see him switch off, retreating back into sullen, brooding silence. _Well,_ he thinks, _fuck you too. Doesn’t cost anything to be nice._

Budge reaches for the remote. It takes a few seconds of bashing at the buttons before he gets closed captioning on. He sits back and stares pointedly at the TV until he hears shuffling beside him. 

Numbers, standing a foot away from the bed, holds out the half-empty bottle towards him. It’s as much thanks as he’s going to get. He nods, takes the bottle—though two days ago, he’d never have drank on the job—and watches the hit man slide the window open, the smoke from his cigarette escaping over the balcony as the sky sinks first to red, then night.


	14. Strange Bedfellows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Budge solves the Fargo case, Wrench confesses, and Numbers investigates. In a manner of speaking.

Federal investigations, much like murder for hire, are composed of a thousand boring moments to every one exciting burst of adrenaline. Numbers once staked out a mark’s house from across the man’s street. For almost two weeks, the piece-of-shit putz had done nothing but eat Doritos in his underwear in front of the TV. Fuck knew how he’d ever summoned enough motivation to break out of his sad little life long enough to piss off the syndicate. Numbers had eventually had to walk right up to him and blow off the back of the head when he went to the corner store for a pack of smokes—the glamorous life of a professional murderer.

And that was just the killing, and the waiting to kill. Most of his jobs had involved musty phone books and lengthy conversations with county clerks and strip club waitresses, rooting through Styrofoam take-out containers and used condoms. Men die for the shit they thoughtlessly discard.

This particular search is conducted largely in the file room of the Plaza de Sol building under the archivist’s watchful eye, and Numbers begrudges every minute of it. Research trips with Wrench used to be fun. Like most socially isolated kids, both of them had grown up with libraries as refuge; Wrench’s unabashed enthusiasm at being surrounded by books used to remind Numbers of how the shelves had once served as his own personal demilitarized zone. And, of course, the depths of the stacks were prime make-out territory. Now he’s hunched at Budge’s side, lest he go running off, shielded under a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses that probably render him more, not less, conspicuous. It’s hot as hell, but he can’t get warm, no matter how much he tugs the ends of the sleeves over his hands.

Numbers suspects Budge has a similar thirst for knowledge, probably even some comparable tragic story involving adults who didn’t understand him and books that did, but the differences only serve to compound the steel-edge of his loss. It’s been 72 hours since he last went to sleep with Wrench’s arms heavy around him, his back against his partner’s chest, since he tossed halfway through the night and felt Wrench, half-dreaming, press a warm palm to his scars and kiss the top of his head. He’s barely slept at all since then, and when he does, he dreams of snow and knives, dreams that he’s already dead and that his life since Duluth has been nothing more than a splutter of consciousness before permanent night.

More than once, he’s dreamt of the hospital room back in Fargo where his father died, of the smell of decay and old man’s piss and antiseptic, and wonders why, before Malvo took his fateful tour of the offices above the Chinese restaurant, he hadn’t thought of the old bastard in years.

The strangest thing is he thinks Budge would probably get it. He doesn’t know what to make of the man, but Budge isn’t like any cop he’s ever met. Half the time the guy has all the professional acumen of a college freshman who’s just discovered the pleasures of hot-boxing his dorm room, rambling about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin or why sometimes when you drive over a bridge you have the sudden urge to swerve through the guardrail and plummet to your death, but he’s the one who ends up unearthing the reams of land deal contracts and zoning permits, distilled through a series of shell companies, that when taken together map out Abel Reinhardt’s development plan for the outer regions of the War Zone directly adjacent to the vaguely shitty neighborhood where he’d set up his real estate office.

And, to give the agent credit, he’d figured out the computer thing. It makes communicating with him easier and also annoys the fuck out of him, which is a nice bonus.

“ _Nothing worse than a criminal who thinks he’s above other criminals,_ ” Numbers says, once they’ve retreated with an armful of photocopies to the not-even-off-the-grid motel room that’s become their base of operations. Budge side-eyes him before tacking a map onto the beige, textured wallpaper, beside the obligatory photos of the major players. Numbers is gratified to see that he and Wrench—with the accompanying _Fargo???_ on a post-it note—rank high enough to be included on Budge’s Wall of Bugfuck Crazy, as though in Budge’s bizarre mind, Mr. Numbers the Contract Killer is somehow a separate entity from the sad sack son-of-a-bitch helping him take Hutchinson down.

Budge is the one who figures out the business plan, the thin veneer of legality over the rot below, but Numbers has the last piece. He doesn’t know south Albuquerque the way he knows the Midwest, but he’s been living there for nearly a year and you can’t work security for a man like Reinhardt and not keep apprised of the Byzantine rat’s nest of gang politics.

More specifically, who gets busted, and who doesn’t.

“ _He’s not trying to go legit._ ” Numbers uses what he’s decided is the most irritating of all the voices, the words slotting uneasily into a funeral march. “ _He’s trying to destroy the competition. He’s building a monopoly.”_

It takes some time to explain, and hours longer for Budge to make phone calls and search databases until he can confirm Numbers’ theory. Most of it’s still circumstantial, at least from the FBI’s point of view, but there’s a mutually beneficial pattern. Reinhardt plays the gangs against each other, making deals with the ones who get greedy, the urban entrepreneurs like Morales with their eyes on expansion and money laundering, and he uses those contacts to sell out the others to Hutchinson. Hutchinson gets the high-level busts and the promotion, and Reinhardt expands his turf without ever directly engaging his rivals. The streets remain clean and orderly, but for the drugs exchanged and girls trafficked, indoors, so as not to offend the respectable people buying in to the area.

“Neat,” Budge says, and he sounds _impressed._ “It’s not enough to stick to Hutchinson, though.”

Numbers considers telling him that they don’t need to prove either man’s guilt to a jury; they just need to take them both out. Maybe half a dozen more accomplices and the rest will scatter to the wind. He could give two shits about the rest of it. The second Hutchinson’s out of the picture, another dirty DEA agent will take his place. It’s the way of the world, and if it weren’t for crooked cops, his own job would have been much harder.

“ _Bug his office?_ ”

“You’ve watched too many cop shows.” Budge slumps into the chair facing the wall. “Besides, he’s not going to say shit out loud. Webb found out about him and got _shot_ for it. You’ve got a better chance getting Reinhardt to talk.”

Numbers shakes his head. Reinhardt’s not going to talk to him. Reinhardt’s going to shoot him on sight; he’s already got Wrench, and he only needs one of them alive until he can get his money back.

“ _What’s your plan?_ ” He might be imagining it, but he thinks the robot voice managed the right amount of derision.

Budge sighs. “Keep building the case,” he says. “Go through assets until something smells fishy and associates until someone talks. Keep gathering evidence until it’s irrefutable. Hutchinson’s smarter than he looks, but we have lots on Reinhardt and I’m betting he’ll roll if the alternative is life.”

Wrench hasn’t got that long. Fuck it. Numbers stands up, makes a go for his stuff.

“Hey, where are—” Budge starts before realizing that he sounds like a fucking idiot. Numbers pauses rooting through his bag for long enough to return to the laptop.

“ _Going after him._ ” 

“The fuck you are.”

He finds the remainder of the ammo, stuffed at the bottom, thankfully still dry. He’d packed in a panic, had the foresight to throw whatever he could carry into one of the duffel bags before abandoning the car to get shitfaced and soaked in the rain. Budge sees what he’s doing and says, “Hey, hey. Stop for a second.”

_Try me, asshole_ ,he thinks, adrenaline spiking through the hangover. If he runs, Budge will stop him.

Good.

He’s useless with a gun and worse with a knife, but he didn’t survive to a decrepit middle age in the world he lives in without being able to throw a punch, or without being able to take one. He winds up and strikes before the FBI agent can brace for it, catches the side of his jaw and sends him reeling. He leaves the bag sitting where it is on the bed and lunges at him. This time, Budge sees him coming; feints and dodges the blow at the last minute, then slams him into the wall, forearm bent across his throat.

Unstoppable force, meet immovable object, except not quite. They’re about the same size, about as strong, physically speaking; but while Budge has spent the last year going to seed in a basement filing room, while he doesn’t look like much with his cheap suit and stupid novelty socks, he’s got the upper hand. Numbers doesn’t care; he wants to suffer, to bleed. He just wants to make the other man bleed more first. 

“Stay still,” Budge hisses in his face. “You’re not doing him any good.” 

_You fucking pig,_ Numbers thinks, _you don’t get to bring him into it. You don’t have that_ right.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Budge says, and Numbers strains to get free, so Budge does. He pushes his elbow into Numbers’ throat and shoves downwards; Numbers’ back crunches under him and he folds to the floor. Of course, Budge is observant, he’s seen how Numbers limps when he’s tired, knows to use the mass of his own wrung-out, broken body against him. Numbers climbs to his knees, fingers splayed on the beige, ragged carpet, and tells himself he deserves every bit of the pain coursing through him.

Budge already has his hand outstretched to help him up. Numbers scowls but takes it, ignoring the shock of pain down his back and leg, hobbles to the desk. It hurts, fuck it hurts, the way everything has since Duluth, clarified and bright, a knife hollowing him out from the inside. He wishes he were still drunk. He wishes he were dead. He wishes Wrench was here.

He must have blacked out for a second because he doesn’t see Budge leave, just Budge kneeling beside the chair a moment later, thrusting a glass of water at him.

“Where’s the girl’s mother?” Budge asks, not demanding, but counting on the pain to make him dazed and compliant, the Lorne Malvo School of Enhanced Interrogation. Numbers doesn’t blurt it, can’t, even if the room’s spinning before his eyes. Instead, he shakes his head. Budge is a smart guy, maybe he’ll figure it out.

He breathes, controlled and steady through his nostrils. He could dive for the gun, splatter Budge’s brains across the hideous wallpaper, but inertia wins.

“You said Reinhardt had women. Girls. The kid was one of them?” 

Numbers leans forward, hands on his knees, gripping fistfuls of the ash grey cotton. If he’s going on a suicide run, he decides, he needs his own clothes back.

“You stole her from him. Or your partner did.” Budge opens the file and it falls to surveillance photos of them, Olivia hiding behind Wrench’s leg, oblivious to the camera. Assuming, with the wide-eyed innocence of youth, that Wrench would protect her from anything. “I don’t think you did that because you wanted to hurt her.” 

Numbers shakes his head. He’s not going to think about what happened to the girl. If she’s lucky, she’s dead, but she probably isn’t.

“You can’t just steal a kid.” If he could talk, he’d point out the absurdity of telling a contract killer that abducting a child from a wannabe drug kingpin is illegal. “So you don’t ditch your partner and run off with the money when you have the chance. You rescue little girls from drug lords and pimps. Shit, Mr. Numbers, what the fuck am I supposed to do with you? The syndicate know you have a heart in there?”

His father’s disappointment, his uncle’s. Aaron, always the fucking favorite, leering at him as his heart cracks in half. Yeah, they knew all right, and fuck them to hell for it.

“They can’t have sanctioned this. That why you came to me?”

What must it be like to be Budge, ten steps in front of most people and a step behind actual reality, gaping in bewilderment at the universe? He still thinks Numbers is going to hand the syndicate over, still thinks he’s going to have a career at the end of this. Numbers feels a bit bad for the guy; he wishes he could have given them up to him instead of to Malvo.

A wheezing laugh forces itself out of his damaged throat. He sits up, his back screaming, and hammers on the keyboard, _theyre all dead you dumb fuck._

As stupid as it is to throw down his trump card like that, he’s not making it out of this room in time to rescue Wrench, and he at least has the satisfaction of watching someone else’s world fall apart for once. 

Budge fumbles for words, crumbling, lips moving in failed permutations of questions, denial, refutations, until he manages, “…but, what?”

Numbers doesn’t bother with text-to-speech. He types: _Malvo shot them all the end. Case closed. Go home._  

Budge is staring at him, brows drawing together and upwards, crinkling his forehead. “Who sent you to take out Reinhardt then?” 

Numbers takes pity on him, and mercy-kills the FBI’s elaborate conspiracy theories all at once. _No one. We worked for him after Malvo put us out of a job. Needed more $ than he was paying._ He shrugs, an unwritten, _that’s it._

Budge, though, is still grasping for some unreachable truth, an answer to a riddle no one ever spoke aloud. When he speaks, his voice cracks and fails. “Malvo took out the entire syndicate. All of them.”

_Anyone that mattered._

“Why?”

Numbers slides off his sunglasses and rubs at the bridge of his nose. He’s so fucking tired. _I gave them up._ He could tell Budge the rest of it, how Malvo would have gone after Wrench if Numbers hadn’t surrendered, how Numbers would have massacred all of the bastards himself if it meant keeping Wrench safe. How the grief and guilt have festered since, a slowly metastasizing cancer in a son who disappointed his family for years before he signed their death warrants. He doesn’t, the shame a living thing that stings and bites.

_You came here for nothing,_ he types, and fully expects Budge to walk out, or handcuff him, and he’s spilled out over the desk, too spent not to submit. It doesn’t matter anyway; they both lost, a long time ago.

Budge tents his fingers together. Crosses, then uncrosses his legs, and finally stands, pacing the length of the little room. “I got bigger fish to fry,” he says, half to himself.

“ _No one likes a snitch,_ ” Numbers says. “ _Especially not cops._ ”

“Webb’s got a wife, you know. Vi. Lovely woman. They were expecting, painted the nursery, and then…” He stares pointedly at Numbers, as if Numbers is supposed to care about this. “They think it might have been the stress of everything, with the investigation and the reassignment that did it. She fell apart, and he’s been fighting to keep them both together ever since.” 

Numbers taps on the desk. Boo-fucking-hoo.

“My career’s already toast.” Now Numbers lifts his head, squints at him bleary-eyed. “Damned if I’m going to just go down easy while the asshole who shot my partner walks.” 

Numbers nods. Angry is good. He’s past anger, into emotional numbness; maybe Budge’s outrage can carry them both. “ _What’s your plan?_ ” he asks again.

“Okay,” Budge drags a chair over to the desk. “This is a hostage situation. You negotiate in a hostage situation. We need to open a line of communication with them.”

Numbers likes this plan even less than the last half-assed one, and grumbles as much as the scar tissue strangling his airway allows.

“We make like we have more than we do,” Budge continues. “Demand they give us the kid back, as a gesture of good faith. Keep them talking, and it buys us time to find your friend. And to keep building an actual case.”

The elephant’s sitting on the floor. He refuses to engage it directly. He owes it—and its owner—nothing.

“We need to at least try to save the girl,” Budge says, with the certainty of someone who believes, in the abstract, in the innocence of children but isn’t entirely comfortable in the presence of the little brats.

“ _It won’t work._ ”

“Neither will storming the castle, but it’s what we got. He said you were a hunter. Malvo.” Numbers flinches automatically at the name. “I went to see him, you know. Five, maybe six times. He didn’t make much sense; didn’t tell me anything incriminating or useful. But he talked about you a bit. Respected you, I think, as much as he respects anyone. He said that if he’d had more time, he’d have eaten your heart.” 

Numbers rolls his eyes. Of course he’d nearly get killed by a pretentious egotist with delusions of grandeur. He hopes Malvo is deeply unpopular in prison. 

“So,” Budge says. “Hunt. You know the underworld. Go ask questions.”

Numbers gestures, angrily, at his throat.

“Somehow I don’t think you need to talk to get information out of people.”

“ _How do you know I won’t run away?”_

“Because I’ve met absolute evil, and you’re not it. Oh, you’re a real bad motherfucker, don’t get me wrong, but if you were just in it for yourself, you’d be in Mexico with a fake ID and the rest of the cash by now.” Budge watches him, testing the waters. “You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”

“ _Go fuck yourself,_ ” the computer sings. Then, “ _where will you be?”_

“I’ll poke around the PD. Make some more calls. See if I can narrow down the list of properties and find out where Reinhardt might be holding them. Meet me back here in a few hours.”

Numbers stands up, reaches for the bag again.

“Leave it. I trust you this much—” Budge throws him a room key. “But not _that_ much.”

* * *

Olivia is almost relieved when one of Reinhardt’s men comes to retrieve her. She tells herself that what they have in store for her can’t be any worse than what she imagines in first the hours, then days, cooped up in the locked bedroom.

Cherie, the only one of the girls who’s spoken to her so far, assures her that yes, it’s every bit as bad as what she imagines. 

“That’s Curtis,” she stage-whispers as the man—not as tall as Wrench, but so solidly built that the underside of his jaw looks like it connects directly with the top of his shoulders—unlocks the door and steps inside.

“New girl,” he says.

Cherie’s right; this is _way_ more terrifying already. Olivia backs towards the dresser, almost tripping over one of the mattresses. Curtis swipes at her, one meaty palm connecting with her upper arm, and then Cherie—to her utter shock—steps in between them.

“You don’t wanna touch her. The kinds of johns who like the little ones aren’t gonna pay as much for them all banged up. They like to do that themselves.” 

Her stomach’s going to leap out of her throat. Beyond being confused that Cherie stuck up for her—the other girl’s given no indication that Olivia’s anything more than a pain in her ass—she knows Curtis is the least of her problems right now. 

“You,” Cherie says. “Go with him. It’ll be better for you if you don’t fight back.”

“I feel sick,” Olivia mumbles, but she trails along. Should she fight? She’d probably pass out if the man even punched her once, and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, then.

He puts the bag over her head and stuffs her back in the car, and she tries to pay attention to where they’re going but she can’t, not with how her heart is thumping, and it seems like the same way they came only it _can’t_ be. It’s only when he marches her up familiar steps and the bag’s torn off that she realizes they’re not in some seedy motel but back in the trailer.

Wrench is still cuffed to the chair, though they’ve freed his right hand to write with. He’s slumped forward, and what she can see of his face, of any of his skin, is mottled purple and yellow, blood cracked and peeling beneath a split lip, under his nose, along the side of his jaw. Despite the gauze taped over his thigh, his jeans are stiffened in rust, and one leg of the chair sits on a circle of blood that’s dried into the carpet. 

She screams out his name before she can stop herself, before she remembers that he can’t hear her anyway, and maybe they didn’t know his name before, maybe they didn’t know that she was close enough to him to know his name; still, she tries to bolt from Curtis’s grip to run to him. He tilts his head up, one swollen eye acknowledging her presence, but nothing more.

Is he ready to tell them everything? She couldn’t blame him. He must be in so much pain. Just seeing him like this is enough to break her, to make her want to promise them anything if they’ll stop hurting him.

His lips are moving, silently, and she tugs her arm away from Curtis’s grasp. “Let me _go._ ” She doesn’t know where the sudden bravery comes from; maybe it’s because she’s doomed, because anything that can hurt a guy like Wrench will demolish her. 

Reinhardt nods, and she stumbles forward as Curtis abruptly releases her. She runs to Wrench’s side. With him sitting, they’re eye-to-eye, and she can hear the hiss of breath from his lips, broken little noises that might, if she concentrates, emerge as words. She thinks, at first, he’s telling her to stall, and that makes sense, maybe he’s trying to conserve the last of his strength for an attack, maybe he thinks Numbers is coming to rescue them after all, and then he lifts his one free hand to touch her face and whispers it again.

_Crystal,_ he’s saying. It takes her a second because he doesn’t have any idea how the word’s supposed to sound. He’s never heard it. He’s parting back her hair with his thick fingers and muttering the same name, over and over again. 

“I don’t understand.” She’s whispering too, but what’s the point? It’s not like Reinhardt can’t hear everything, and at the best of times Wrench would find it hard to read her lips. “Who’s Crystal?” 

He blinks, eyes focusing on her for the first time. “’Liva,” he says. 

“Yeah,” Olivia says, “yeah, it’s me. I’m here.” She folds her hand over the back of his where it’s pressed to her hair. He pulls it away, finally aware, it seems, of where he is and who he’s talking to. 

He jerks his head towards Reinhardt. _Money,_ he spells out, and she nods. _Sister grave._

_Don’t under—_ she starts, and doesn’t need to finish. 

_Buried,_ he signs. _Lubbock._ _Crystal Hayes._

“You want me to tell him that?” She’s shaking. If he gives Reinhardt the location of the stolen money, Reinhardt has no real reason to keep the only person who cares about her alive. She follows his gaze to his erstwhile boss, who pointedly looks at his watch. Wrench isn’t looking at the man’s face, though. He pulls her face back towards him. _Keys._  

She can just see the hint of metal in Reinhardt’s pockets, and— _oh_. She makes her hand into a fist and nods it up and down, and he smiles wearily. 

Warily, placing herself between Reinhardt and Curtis, between the fire and the frying pan, she says, “He says the money’s buried in his sister’s grave, back in Lubbock. Her name was Crystal Hayes.” 

“That so?” Reinhardt squints over at Wrench, who’s stopped moving again. She shifts from one foot to the other, looking anywhere but at his pocket. She’s done this before, dozens of times, ever since she was little, but now her life, and Wrench’s, depends on it, and everyone’s attention is on her.

Reinhardt walks over to Wrench. Looms over him, and Olivia hates him for it, hates that he’s had to beat and torture her protector into a bloody pulp just to have that advantage. Take away the guns and the Taser and the cuffs and Wrench could snap his neck with his bare hands.

“You wouldn’t by any chance be lying to me, would you?”

Wrench shakes his head.

“Because the girl’s staying right here while I send my men out to look for my money,” he says. “If you _are_ lying, she dies. Right here, right in front of you. And it will hurt the whole time she’s dying.”

Her hand takes over for her brain, slips between the sightlines of the men around her, just the slightest whisk and she palms the keys, lifts the hem of the stupid babydoll dress Cherie forced her into, and slips them into the waistband of her tights. Reinhardt laughs, and for a split second she’s sure he’s seen, sure she’s about to face that painful death sooner rather than later, but it’s Wrench he’s laughing at, Wrench who’s at last been broken.

He starts to shove her towards the wall but she pushes back. “Please.” She hasn’t noticed the tears, not until now, when they’re burning her eyes. “Please, just let me,” and to her surprise Reinhardt backs away, still grinning, and lets her rush back to Wrench’s side. She throws her arms around him, buries her head against his shoulder while she retrieves the keys and slips them into his palm.

And then she’s being dragged off him, back into the corner, tied and shoved and forced to kneel against the flimsy panel of the wall, Curtis’s gun aimed at her head as though she were an actual threat, as Reinhardt orders his men back in search of the stolen cash, and Wrench’s eyes go glazed and blank as he retreats somewhere far away, to the lost sister his weary mind transformed Olivia into, and she hopes he’s at least spared some of his torment there.

“What now?” she asks Reinhardt. They have just over four hours before Reinhardt’s thugs reach Lubbock and find whatever it is they’re going to find. Which, Olivia suspects, isn’t going to be the money. 

“You pray, little girl,” Reinhardt says. “You pray he’s telling the truth.”

She prays. But not for that.

* * *

“Reinhardt has three properties under development and one demolition that _could_ be where—” 

Budge stops talking, the door only half-open, but enough to catch a glimpse of what’s inside. He slips in, very quickly, reaches for his gun just to reassure himself that it’s there, and shuts the door before anyone in the hallway can see.

There’s a man tied to the bed. _His_ bed, and bound with _his_ ties, save for the tie Numbers is wearing with a shirt that also belongs to Budge, and several pairs of what Budge can only assume—given the circumstances—are his underwear. 

Numbers has the chair pulled up beside the bed, turned around so he’s straddling the back with his arms, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow, crossed over the top where Budge’s suit jacket is draped. From where he’s standing, Budge can see the scrape of red across his knuckles, the matching mess of the captive’s nose. The man’s not moving around much, and whatever screams he might try to make are muffled by the boxers stuffed in his mouth. Other than his nose he looks unharmed; Budge concludes that he’s probably not the muscle, probably didn’t put up much of a fight.

“Hi,” Budge says. “Nice suit.” It’s his best one, but going by the predatory glint in the hit man’s eyes, Numbers can keep it. 

Numbers swings around the side of the chair and stands. Budge wonders if he can go for the gun fast enough to stop Numbers from killing him, if that’s the hit man’s plan. 

“I take it—” Not a step back, not a show of weakness. Numbers has been torturing a man, or at the very least, has tied him up and _stared_ at him with those dead, soulless eyes, for hours. On the same bed where Budge was sleeping last night. What was he thinking, not arresting the man immediately? “—this is one of Reinhardt’s guys, and not some kinky sex thing? Or a federal offence?”

Numbers responds with a small, pointed laugh. He snaps the list of properties that Budge is holding out of his hand, walks over to Budge’s evidence wall, and pins it up. Then he points to one of the addresses, a future strip mall in the suburbs, supposedly.

“You beat that out of him? You can’t just—it’s not admissible in—”

His phone is ringing.

_Pepper,_ he thinks, even before he sees the caller ID. _Pepper’s dead._  

It’s Vi, and she sounds—well, not _good_ , but less broken than she’s sounded in days. 

“Hey,” she says, soft below the phone’s crackle. “I got someone who wants to talk to you.”

He hears, for the first time in an eternity, Pepper say his name. His voice is dry, feeble, but he’s awake, he’s _alive._ It’s only now that Budge understands that he didn’t expect him to be. “Hear you’re going after Hutchinson. Alone.”

Budge glances at the killer he’s unwisely allowed into his motel room, his confidence, who has at last found his target. Who doesn’t have this eleventh hour reassurance that the people he cares about are safe and, therefore, has nothing to lose. “Not quite alone,” he admits. “There’s a plan.” He tells Pepper, worries at first when the line seems to fall silent at times. “You gonna tell me to be careful?”

Pepper coughs, and he can hear Vi fussing in the background. “I was gonna say kick his ass.”

Budge grins. “Okay, man. You hang in there. One way or another—” He watches Numbers slip on his suit jacket, adjust his tie in the mirror, as if he’s going to a business meeting and not a massacre. “I’ll see you real soon.”


	15. Hellbound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things go boom. Also, Budge gets an answer to his latest riddle.

“So a man buys a bottle.”

Budge isn’t even sure that Numbers is listening to his story. With his shades on, Budge can’t tell where he’s looking, though he suspects it’s through the windshield and not at him. There’s nowhere to park anywhere near the construction site that wouldn’t expose their position; he can tell that Numbers just wants to ram ahead and burn the place to the ground, but they have a _plan,_ dammit. And part of that plan involves watching and waiting for longer than either of them would like.

Budge keeps talking anyway. No one’s given him a satisfactory answer to the riddle yet. Besides, he’s hardly a stranger to long, boring stakeouts, and it’s just his luck to be stuck with a mute companion.

Numbers, naturally, won’t answer either, and the silence while Budge waits is increasingly uncomfortable. The hit man fidgets in the passenger seat, his attention focused on the rows of cookie-cutter bungalows, the parked SUVs, the flat desolation of the cul de sac. There’s still blood under his fingernails, incongruous with his otherwise tidy demeanor, a hint of what he’d done to extract information from the prisoner who, for lack of better options, is currently cuffed and gagged in the back seat of Budge’s rental car. 

What the fuck has he gotten himself into?

Budge checks his watch. “Ready?”

All he gets in response is his own reflection, slanted and distorted in Numbers’ sunglasses. The hit man is still tense, but the nervous, hunted slouch in his posture is gone, whatever vulnerability he might have once possessed masked by his shades. This is probably what he’s like just before he kills someone—on edge, certainly, but hyperaware. Dangerous. Budge digs out his phone and makes the call.

“Hey there.” He hasn’t spoken to Hutchinson in days, not since the hospital, but the other man slides into the conversation with easy Southern familiarity. “How’s Pepper?”

The words come thick and clumsy, begging to be left unsaid even as he has Vi’s assurances, less than fifteen minutes ago, that they’re a lie, that it’s just to protect him. “Dead,” he says, and Budge doesn’t need to force the weight of grief into his delivery. “Late last night.”

“Christ,” Hutchinson says, “shit, Bill, I’m sorry.” Budge can hear him tapping; he’s at his computer, no doubt looking it up, but Vi’s already taken care of that, called in some favors at the paper, explaining that it had to do with an active FBI case.

“Yeah. He, uh, he woke up though. Right before. They say it happens sometimes, it’s called—” He pauses, as if he were the sort of person who had to think about these things. “Terminal lucidity. He had some interesting things to say.”

Silence on the end of the line, as if the air had been sucked out of the room. “Pete? Pete, you still there?”

He can still hear Hutchinson breathing. The inhales and exhales get faster, louder. Budge waits.

“Agent Budge,” Hutchinson says, at last, no more forced jocularity. “Whatever you think is—”

“He said you’re up to your neck in it. That true, Pete? Why would he say it— _dying words,_ Pete—if it weren’t true?”

“You don’t understand what you’re getting yourself into.” Hutchinson’s voice has lost its rolling ease. “You and your partner—God rest his soul—came down to investigate a link to one of your old cases. Mistakes were made. Don’t get all paranoid on me now.” He laughs, but it’s nervous this time. Hums the _X-Files_ theme.

“Yeah, that case is pretty much closed. Coupla washed-up hit men.” Numbers frowns, and he responds with a tight-lipped smile. “A dirty DEA agent is _way_ more interesting to the Bureau.”

“Where are you right now, Agent Budge?”

“Why, so you can shoot me too? We’ve already made one arrest and we’re bringing Abel Reinhardt in soon as we find him. Word is the DA is gonna offer him a deal. I wonder what song _he’s_ gonna be singing.”

Now Hutchinson sounds panicked. “We need to meet. Talk. Just the two of us.” 

“You can make this easier on yourself.” Budge’s own heart is racing, but he reins it in. He is calm. He is the one in control. There’s a drug lord’s henchman writhing in the backseat and a murderer beside him, all but screaming to be let loose, but he forces slow, deep breaths, the very voice of reason and empathy. “Let’s start with the kid. Do you know where she is? You let her go, and there’s room to maneuver.”

Numbers twitches; he wants news of his partner. Budge holds up his hand. He hears the line go dead.

“And he’s off,” Budge says. “So much for hostage negotiations.” Numbers unfastens his seatbelt. “Wait, I’m calling for backup. We’re doing this all above board. I’m guessing Hutchinson’s on his way, no way he’s going to have this conversation over the phone. You just sit still.”

He calls the dispatch, still watching Numbers out of the corner of his eye. He gets less runaround than he’d have thought. When he’s hung up, he turns to the other man.

“We haven’t discussed if you’ll testify. I’m not in a position to offer you a deal, not right now.”

Numbers exhales sharply through his nose, and Budge immediately regrets bringing it up when they’re about to walk into a gunfight. The man’s looking squirrelly as hell. He reaches for the laptop, types something, deletes it, and finally has the computer say, “ _No deal. Just put us in the same cell when it’s over._ ”

Budge is about to say he’s not in a position to offer that either, even assuming that all three of them are left standing at the end, but the grim set of Numbers’ mouth dissuades him, and he says nothing.

They sit in the quiet of the late afternoon at the end of the cul de sac, and wait. The man in the back seat, soon to be handed over to legitimate, incorruptible authorities, and thus no longer Budge’s responsibility, whimpers through the gag. Outside, swarms of tiny black insects weave and dance against a purpling sky, dive into sudden death against the car’s windshield. 

“ _You want the answer?_ ” Numbers asks, after the rise and fall of distant sirens become more than either of them can stand. “ _To your riddle._ ”

Budge raises an eyebrow. “The bottle imp story? I don’t think there is an answer; I think it’s an allegory, you know, for how we think we’re in control, that we can make rational decisions and be rewarded for it, but the result, you see, is—”

Numbers must have started typing the moment he started speaking. Probably before. “ _Who, acting rationally, buys the bottle from the man, knowing he can’t sell it to anyone else, and condemns himself to hell for the sake of someone else?_ ” He reaches over and pops the trunk. Before Budge realizes what’s happening, he’s opened the door and is halfway out, stopping only to hit a button and play the last sentence. 

“ _Someone,_ ” the computer reads for him, even as he’s outside, grabbing something out of the trunk, even as Budge fumbles at his own seatbelt, for his gun, “ _who knows he’s going to hell already._ ”

* * *

The blackout shades on the windows give no indication of the passage of time, but Wrench stops counting at fourteen thousand seconds. Reinhardt’s men must be most of the way to Lubbock by now, armed with shovels to dig up his sister’s grave, and he tells himself he can’t let that distract him from keeping time. He counts the way he did when he and Crystal were kids, one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, feels the afternoon pass with the cooling of air on his bare arms, and pretends that it distracts from the pain. 

Whatever’s happening outside the trailer, Reinhardt is agitated, pacing back and forth while he shouts into his cell. Wrench tries to pick up words, a scattered sentence, but Reinhardt notices and turns away from him. Olivia mouths something at him from across the room, but it’s impossible to tell what it is. 

Nearly four hours. Soon they’ll reach the grave, and finding it disappointing, they’ll call Reinhardt. How much time he and the girl have left is largely dependent on traffic, but it can’t be much longer. 

Seconds, uncounted, pass him by. 

He allows the acceptance that Numbers isn’t coming to rescue him to settle in slow, agonizing increments. Numbers is gone. He’s never coming back.

In a way, it’s a relief. He can pretend—though it’s almost certainly not true—that Numbers has fled, found somewhere safe to lie low for a while before he moves on with his life. He can imagine, in whatever minutes remain, that somewhere, the possibility of freedom, of something resembling happiness, while lost to him, at least exists for his partner. 

It doesn’t hurt any less if he lies to himself.

He stares across the trailer at Olivia. The girl’s bent into a fetal position, bound and unable to even communicate with rudimentary signs, but he makes eye contact with her. She nods, too eager. They’re both going to die, but they both know the alternative.

He scans the room a final time. Five guys, all armed, plus Reinhardt, and nothing but the flimsy laminate office desk for cover or a weapon. He can take one of the guys out, if he’s fast, if he doesn’t trip and fall on his face, grab his gun. Maybe.

A hundred more seconds, he thinks. A thousand; he needs more time, better odds.

He blinks, and the air is cooler when he opens his eyes. He might be wrong about the seconds; blacking out from blood loss without even being aware of it. The key’s still there, wedged between the inside of the handcuffs and his wrist, in case of this very eventuality. He can feel the floor vibrating; something is happening outside. Reinhardt’s arguing with one of his men. Blearily, he meets Olivia’s eyes again. 

She mouths something that might be, “gunshots” or might be “Numbers” or might be fuck knows what else, and okay, fuck, it’s the closest to a chance he’s going to get. He pries the key loose—fumbles, the circulation in his fingers cut off, nearly loses it, but manages eventually to slot it in the hole and release the cuffs. They hit the floor before he can catch them, and the lack of reaction from any of the agitated men around him tells him that there’s something happening outside that’s made him, and any noise he makes, momentarily less interesting.

He steadies his breath, flexes his fingers as blood rushes back to the tips, and watches Olivia dislocate first one thumb, then the other, slipping free of her own restraints. 

 _Now?_ she signs. He indicates the desk with his head. _Cars,_ she tells him, thumbing towards the door. One man goes outside to check, and he flinches from the sudden, bright light streaming through the door. 

 _Now,_ he thinks, and lashes out at the closest man, pulling him into a chokehold with one arm and grabbing the gun out of its holster with the other. The guy struggles, somehow manages to collide with Wrench’s wounded leg, and Wrench bites through his lip to keep from crying out, sucks his breath in and holds it, and, the man positioned as a human shield in front of him, steadies the gun and shoots the guy closest to Olivia.

All hell breaks loose. Obviously. 

He sees the girl crawl across the floor and under the desk, for what little good that’s going to do her, and fires at another man, his hostage bucking against his arm and throwing off his aim. He huffs a sigh and cracks the side of his pistol into the man’s head, only to be taken down by the dead weight collapsing in front of him. His ankles are still bound to the chair legs, and he can’t get untied without losing either his gun or his hostage, so he kicks out in an attempt to smash himself loose.

The jolt of pain is shocking, immediate. He’s probably screaming. All he can think is to hold on, to keep shooting, to stay awake despite the dance of pinprick white and black before his eyes.

Someone kicks in the door.

He has a vague impression of dark shapes moving amid blinding light, decides it has to be Numbers, then, as Reinhardt stretches out his arm and fires, muzzle flash exploding from the end of his pistol, as the closest figure slumps, broken, against the flimsy frame of the door, decides—prays, pleads with God, with the entirety of a hostile and unfeeling universe that’s never seen fit to cut him any bargains—that it could be someone, anyone else.

* * *

Numbers runs without checking to see if Budge is behind him. The poor sad bastard probably is; it’s not like there’s much left for him in any event. Might as well go for Suicide By Drug Dealer and die something like a hero.

Past the houses, at the edge of the construction site, he stops to catch his breath. He’s not getting any younger. The way the day’s going, he’s not getting any older, either, but the tightness in his chest is new, an unwelcome reminder of just how battered the passage of time has left him.

At the other side of the site, he can see a car pulling up, a sleek black Mustang. Hutchinson, rising to Budge’s bait. He readjusts the elephant under his arm.

He hears Budge creep up beside him. “What the fuck are you doing?”

He points at the trailer, set back from the road. The blinds are drawn, but there’s a storm of footprints in the dust outside, and it’s exactly the kind of isolated locale he’d use to stash a prisoner and conduct nefarious business, if that happened to be his thing. 

“SWAT team’s on the way,” Budge says, his voice wavering. Numbers isn’t about to wait for more cops to fuck it all up worse. He’s positive—well, mostly, like, 75, 80 percent sure—that Wrench is in that trailer. And he is going to get his partner out, or die trying.

The trailer door opens, and he sees one guy dash out to meet Hutchinson’s car. A year ago, he could have picked him off from where he’s crouched by the fence without a second thought, but he can’t trust his aim, not now, not when he doesn’t know what’s waiting inside the trailer.

However many of Reinhardt’s goons are in there, his retinue is down by one, and it’s the best odds Numbers is likely to get. He closes his eyes, grips the elephant to his side, and before Budge can raise another protest, sprints across the last dried-mud stretch of no-man’s land until he reaches the side of the trailer.

Budge is right behind him, gun at the ready, and flattens himself against the other side of the door. Resigned to this, nods, lifts up three fingers, then two, then one.

They both slam against the door at the same time, smashing it down with the combined weight of their bodies. He catches a glimpse of Wrench, lying on the floor underneath one of Reinhardt’s men. He sees Reinhardt draw his gun, aimed squarely at Budge, and before he can squeeze off a shot, Numbers pushes the FBI agent backwards through the door.

He hears three sharp cracks, feels something like a shovel strike his chest, and for some reason, doesn’t connect the two until he topples over.

For a split second, he thinks the vest must have failed somehow, that there’s no way he can hurt this much and not be dying, but when he touches his shirt, he can’t feel any blood. He rolls onto his side, groaning, pictures splintered ribs digging into his lungs, internal bleeding, all manner of undignified, prolonged deaths.

Somewhere behind him, he hears a new voice, cranes over to see a man in a dark suit, presumably Hutchinson, with a gun to Budge’s head, and the escaped goon close behind. “Don’t fucking move.”

He glances over at Wrench. Smiles at him, and shrugs, half-apologetic, and does exactly the opposite of what he’s told. 

* * *

 

It’s not exactly the first time Budge has had a gun pointed at his head.

The other time was a tense standoff involving an obscure and doomed far-right militia, and this time, there are no conveniently positioned snipers to come to his aid, just Numbers, lying by the door, the shape of his stolen bulletproof vest barely visible under his stolen shirt. Budge allows himself a split second of relief that the guy’s not dead yet, and doesn’t stop to wonder where that came from.

There’s a moment of quiet clarity where he’s aware of the armed men, the blood, a dark, huddled shape that if he uses a certain amount of imagination might be a little girl, the cold touch of the gun at the back of his skull. The elephant on the floor, which Numbers, lightning fast, picks up and tilts upwards.

The stuffed animal’s trunk explodes a spray of bullets and burning batting over the inside of the trailer, and as Budge throws himself to the ground, the shot from Hutchinson’s gun skimming close enough that he can feel its heat pass his ear, he should have figured it’d be something like that.

He sees two men go down right away, the third, standing behind his right shoulder, jerks his head towards the ceiling just before his eye socket bursts into red. Reinhardt staggers sideways, clutching his shoulder.

Budge, crouched on the floor, throws himself at Hutchinson’s legs. Reinforcements must be minutes away and Numbers is wreaking merry havoc and it’s all the incentive he needs to first wrestle Hutchinson into the dirt and cuff his hands behind him. He crawls to his knees and aim his gun in Reinhardt’s direction. Hostiles subdued, he can at last take a breath.

“Pete Hutchinson, you’re under arrest for the attempted murder of Webb Pepper,” he manages to gasp out. The rest of the charges will have to wait until the ground stops spinning.

“Attempted.”

“I lied. Wasn’t sure how deep it all went.”

Hutchinson stares up from where he’s pinned to the dirt with something akin to actual respect. “No one’s gonna pin any medals on you for this.”

“Think I don’t know that?”

“I’m thinking you don’t have to live with the consequences.” He indicates Reinhardt, frozen at the end of Budge’s gun, blood splattered up the wall behind him. “Once he’s out of the way, once you’re home safe, this city’s gonna eat itself. You have small-timers like that Morales thug jockeying for control of the tiniest bit of turf. It might not be pretty or clean, but we kept _order._ ”

“Is that why you took bribes?” Budge asks. “Why you were his lapdog? Why you shot my partner?” 

“There’s a social contract,” Hutchinson spits out. “You fuck with that delicate balance, and these animals tear each other to pieces. We’re all monsters, Agent Budge. You, and me, and all of them, especially them. I’m just the one holding the whip in hell.” He kicks his head towards the inside of the trailer. “It doesn’t need to end like this. They coulda all died in the shootout. We could both be heroes.”

“You’re right,” Budge says. He watches Numbers stagger to his feet and stumble over to where his partner is lying. “That’s not my problem.” 

Budge, ears still ringing from the shots, leans against the busted doorframe, his pistol still trained on Reinhardt in case he makes a move for any one of the guns strewn between puddles of blood and torn pink plush fabric. He scans the trailer for any sign of the girl. No one is moving inside except Numbers, on his knees where his partner is pinned between a broken chair and an unconscious man. 

In the shadows cast by the blackout shades, Numbers takes off his sunglasses, folds them and puts them into his jacket pocket. He pushes the body away, gathers the bigger man into his arms, and presses their foreheads together. 

Budge is going to have to arrest both of them, of course, but he gives them a moment to cling to each other, Numbers collapsing into his partner’s shoulder, his partner slowly lifting his free hand to pet his hair. 

Reinhardt, sprawled out against the fake wood paneling, sniggers, then coughs. Wary of turning his back on either him, the hit men, or the ostensibly restrained Hutchinson, Budge picks his way across the bloodstained carpet. 

“You’re all dead men,” Reinhardt says. “You know that, right? I have people on the inside, and as for you—” His eyes flicker towards Budge. “Who the fuck is gonna trust you now that you’ve turned on your own?” He stares back at the two hit men, folded together in an undignified heap. “Better shoot him and start running.” 

Instead—predictably enough, Budge thinks—the taller man swings the gun around to aim at Reinhardt. 

“Don’t,” Budge says. “Numbers, tell him to hold his fire.” Even as he speaks, he knows he has no chance, no _right_ , the law aside, Reinhardt’s been torturing him for days, and if Budge were in his place, he can’t say as he’d do any differently. 

Numbers signs something—though whether it’s a direct translation or an order to kill Reinhardt and Budge both, he has no idea—but the gunshot that splits apart the standoff seems to catch him by surprise too.

Reinhardt looks down at the circle of blood spreading over his chest, then past Budge, at the child cradling the rifle emerging from the torn and burned ruins of the stuffed elephant in her arms. He laughs, red bubbling through his teeth, convulses, and is finally still. 

The girl drops the gun. Stands amid the bodies, her thin cotton dress clean and bright and bizarrely untouched by the slaughter, and starts to cry.

* * *

She’s in trouble. 

Well, maybe she’s not in _that_ much trouble. She can’t be charged as an adult, that’s what Morales always said, why took her on in the first place. If Wrench had shot Reinhardt, he’d be in even more trouble than he already is.

But she knows she’s still in trouble.

Olivia stares down at her hands, and wonders why they aren’t trembling. It’s not exactly like firing the guns at the fair, but it’s not that different either, just louder. Hardly any pressure on the trigger. She examines her fingers, the smooth, brown smallness of them, with not a drop of blood to show for any of it. She doesn’t look at where Reinhardt’s lying.

If she doesn’t look she can pretend didn’t actually pull the trigger. That she isn’t happy he’s dead.

She wants to puke. She doesn’t. She thinks maybe that means she’s getting better at this. 

Skirting around the tall black guy—she’s guessing he’s a cop, though Numbers protected him, so maybe not—she flings her arms around Wrench and buries her wet face against his side. He lowers his gun to drape his arm around her, whispers, “Shhh,” into her hair.

“Numbers,” the cop says, his voice oddly soft. “Let her go.”

Well, if he’s a cop, he’s not going to shoot _her,_ even if she did just murder someone _._ “No,” she says. “Leave us alone. Please.”

He clears his throat. “I’m not gonna hurt you,” he says. “My name’s Bill. I’m with the FBI. Who are you?”

She just hugs Wrench tighter. She hears him draw in a hissing breath and she mentally slaps herself; he’s beat up, and she’s making it worse. She slides free and takes his big hand in both of hers.

“They didn’t do anything wrong,” Olivia says, which is a ridiculous thing to say in a trailer full of dead bodies. “They saved my life.”

“Yeah,” Bill says. “I appreciate the, uh, ethical complexity of the situation at hand.” He kneels down, though she notices that he’s still holding _his_ gun. “You’re a really smart little girl, aren’t you? So you gotta know, I’m bringing these guys in. They’ll get their day in court, but, uh yeah. And I need to bring you back to your mum and dad or…whoever.”

“I wanna go with them,” she says. “Take me to jail too. I killed a guy, you saw it.” 

He smiles. He’s got a kind smile, full of white, movie-star teeth. “It doesn’t work like that,” he says. “They killed a lot of people.”

Her vision blurry with tears, she looks up at Wrench. His breathing is quick and shallow; Numbers curled protectively around him. No way she can let them go to prison. 

“They did it to save me,” she whispers, wiping her face with the back of her wrist.

“I know,” Bill says. “But they’ve been doing it longer than you’ve been alive, too.” All of a sudden, he doesn’t look so kind anymore. He meets Numbers’ eyes, the way adults do when they think they’re having a conversation you won’t understand.  “C’mon, man. You know what needs to happen. The SWAT team will be here any second and I don’t want bloodshed.” 

Numbers stares him down right back, moving in front of both of them, and her heart clenches suddenly. He was only putting up with her because of Wrench; how can he be willing to take a bullet for her now?

No, she decides. This won’t happen. She wants desperately to scream out in frustration, but she bites her wrist instead, the pain a diversion from the stinging heat of her eyes. “Let’s go.” She tugs at Wrench’s hand. “Come on, let’s go, there are two of you, he can’t stop us.” But Wrench can’t hear her, can’t run even if he wanted to, and he just tilts her face away, so she’s looking into his battered face and not at the carnage.

“Is this what you want for her?” Bill asks. She can just see his hand circling the inside of the trailer, the bodies split open like burst balloons, spilled over the industrial carpet.

“What about what _I_ want?” She can barely speak through the tears, great heaving sobs that wrack her entire body. Stupid question, stupid to think the answer would ever be one she can live with. All her life, and there’s only been one pathway out of hell; she can’t bear to watch it snatched away from her. And yet.

Bill is still talking to Numbers. “There’s a right thing to do here,” he says. 

Just like that, she knows what she has to do. “There are other girls,” she blurts out. “Reinhardt had a bunch of girls, all trapped in a house. I know where it is. I can take you there. We can go right now.”

Bill’s forehead wrinkles. “And I just let these guys go?”

“You want that too.” She’s taking a flying leap here, but she didn’t imagine Numbers pushing Bill out of the way of the gunfire. “It was crazy in there, they could have gotten away in all the shooting, it was more important to save the girls.” She’s babbling, and it’s not lost on her how much she sounds like Hutchinson, telling him that he can just kill everyone and bury the truth.

Wrench starts signing with his other hand. She catches _F-O-S-T-E_ and says, “He thinks you’re gonna send me to a foster home.” And now that she thinks about it, she doesn’t know what’s scarier—the thought that they’d return her to her mom and whatever vengeance the neighborhood gangs will take on her for her part in Morales’ death, or the thought that she’d end up being bounced through the system just like everyone else in her family.

“I think I have a way around that,” Bill says. He stoops to meet Wrench’s eyes. “I will look after her.” He exaggerates his lip movements around the words, then glances at Numbers. “Tell him that, okay? She won’t go into foster care. I promise. I’ll keep her safe.”

She can hear cars screaming along the highway. They’ll be here, and she can maybe talk one FBI agent out of arresting a guy who saved his life, but the second the SWAT team arrives, Wrench and Numbers have no chance at all. She climbs to her feet. Numbers rushes forward to grab hold of her; weirdly, it’s Wrench who reaches out for his arm and pulls him back. 

Minutes later, the SWAT team will swarm over the construction site, into the trailer, where only corpses and Agent Pete Hutchinson, handcuffed with a handwritten note pinned to his shirt, remain. The time before slows to a drip, as Bill reaches his decision, as Wrench does, as Numbers, his face crumpling, grudgingly accepts it.

 _Find me,_ she spells out. She casts one glance back at them, then holds out her hand for Bill to take, and together, they walk into the last of the sunlight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I was trying to finish this thing up before the new season aired and invariably Jossed some of the backstory, but life invariably interfered.
> 
> Still, as this story—so much longer than I'd intended—is drawing to a close, how about a playlist?
> 
> [Departure Points](http://8tracks.com/groteskburlesque/departure-points?utm_medium=referral&utm_content=mix-page&utm_campaign=embed_button) from [groteskburlesque](http://8tracks.com/groteskburlesque?utm_medium=referral&utm_content=mix-page&utm_campaign=embed_button) on [8tracks Radio](http://8tracks.com?utm_medium=referral&utm_content=mix-page&utm_campaign=embed_button).


	16. Ghosts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "What if I want to stay?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last chapter got hellaciously long. Ending of Lord of the Rings long, if there were fewer elves in that and more contract killers. Which is to say I'm splitting it into two parts. Hope no one minds. :)

_Wrench’s dreams, that first night, are the first peaceful ones he’s had in years._

_Half an hour along the highway there is a field—first left fallow, then abandoned, now overgrown with weeds—and the roofless remains of a grain silo. Crystal, exiled princess of the trailer park, yellow dandelions woven into her copper hair, sits cross-legged, pulling up grass stems, her back against the silo’s rusted castle wall. He is across from her, in faded jeans that his long, skinny legs have already outgrown, a thick and dog-eared paperback dictionary spread out between them while they wiggle their fingers at each other in approximations of words._

Bury me here, _she says._ Promise.

You’re already buried.

_She shrugs._ Okay. But this is where I’d like to be, if I have to be somewhere forever. 

_This is where they went when they needed to get away from foster parents and siblings and social workers. Years later, he’d hitchhike back out here, search for some sign that she’d escaped too, that she’d somehow find a way to him. He can still remember how she looked, that day that they didn’t know would be their last together._

That’s where you are, _he agrees. He’s been everywhere, hitched from one coast to the next, drove up and down and across state lines. All she’s ever known was this tiny corner of the world, the crumbling tower that she claimed for both of them, and that’s enough for her._

_He sits in the crescent of light that falls when the sun strikes the silo at just the right angle._ It’s getting late, _Crystal tells him._ Time to say goodbye.

What if I want to stay?

_She points outside. Facets of sunlight dance red and gold through the tall grass, and he can see, in the distance, the black silhouette of a man standing, arms crossed, as if grown impatient waiting for him._

He’s cute, _Crystal observes, pausing to twirl a strand of hair around her finger._ Not what I would have expected.

_Wrench laughs; “cute” isn’t exactly the word he’d use. But she’s right. Life awaits him, and she is not the only ghost he’ll have to lay to rest before, at last, he’s home._

_She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a treasure map she drew, carefully stained with coffee and burned on the edges with a Zippo lighter. She’s already too old, even in his memory, to play games of make-believe, but they unfold it between them, and seeing her childish X where she hid bracelets shoplifted from the strip mall, where, years later, he will bury the remains of his ill-gotten fortune in a place even his partner—who knows him better than anyone in the world—wouldn’t be able to find it._

_She gives him a little wave. Already she is becoming the shadow of corrugated metal, the overgrown earth, already the dream flares at the edges. The sunlight becomes an incandescent bulb behind a lampshade and the echo of a street light through a grimy window._

I’ll come back, _he tells her. Not to bury her but to unearth the memory of her, and when he returns, one last time, he won’t be alone._

* * *

He wakes up in a motel bed, the honey-haze of morphine dripping slow through his veins, and has a moment of wondering which town, which room, which constellation of injuries. Numbers is sprawled out opposite from him at the bottom of the bed, uncharacteristically rumpled, his shirt untucked, torn and minus a few buttons, jacket and tie tossed over the back of a nearby chair. He’s running a finger up and down the inside of one of Wrench’s bare feet. When he sees that Wrench is awake, he pulls back as if burned and shifts up on his elbow. 

_You look like shit,_ Wrench signs. There are dark purple bags below his eyes, and while he’s managed to strip off Wrench’s filthy clothes and wash the dried blood from his skin, he apparently hasn’t had the time or inclination to do the same for himself.

The images come back in fragments: Numbers dragging him out of the trailer, into a waiting car. Driving—Numbers drives like a maniac, jittery and nervous, which is why Wrench never lets him take the wheel if he can help it—while he slides in and out of consciousness in the back seat. The cracked avocado green of motel bathroom tiles and the sting of antiseptic. Numbers, onces he’s convinced Wrench is out cold, in the chair by the window, blood-caked fingers gripping the fabric of his pants at the knees, and shivering like a child.

_You look worse._ As if Wrench hadn’t guessed that. His vision is restricted to a narrow squint through swollen eyes, and even with the morphine, his whole body aches, the shockwaves reverberating outward from his wounded leg, an afterimage of every blow and humiliation visited on him in the last few hellish days. And then there’s the way Numbers is watching him, heavy brows pinched together like a Frida Kahlo self-portrait above eyes that could immolate planets, the line of tension through his body though by all signs, they’re both out of immediate danger. _Sick of pulling bullets out of you._

_I’m sick of getting shot,_ Wrench signs back, which is when he remembers Reinhardt blasting his pistol, Numbers collapsing into the doorframe. He points at Numbers’ chest.

His partner gives a funny little shrug. _Bulletproof vest,_ he signs, as if that makes everything okay, but he obligingly unfastens the remaining buttons on his shirt. His torso is one giant bruise from collarbone down, mottled black under the matt of fur and the lines of tattoos. Wrench curls a hand over his flank, trails his fingers up the slight bump of his ribs. His breath quickens under Wrench’s palm but he doesn’t flinch, so at least nothing’s broken. He keeps his hand there for a moment longer, until the thud of Numbers’ heart convinces him that his partner is fine, then pulls back.

_You’re an asshole,_ Wrench signs. _I thought you were dead._

For an uncomfortable moment, Wrench is afraid Numbers is just going to shut down, play it off as a joke. _I’m tired,_ he says instead.

_Get over here._

Numbers only briefly hesitates, then stretches out along Wrench’s good side, his beard and chest hair a scratchy tickle against Wrench’s bare skin. He goes still the instant Wrench lifts his hand to stroke his temple. They’re too close to talk like this, but—after days of shocks and beatings and straining to read lips—he finds himself with at once too much and nothing to say. He leans his face into Numbers’ hair and breathes, the warmth of him filling his nostrils even as the scent of death clings to his skin, holds him and feels the tension in his muscles slacken.

He doesn’t realize he’s crying until Numbers sits up, wipes the cuff of his sleeve against Wrench’s cheek, and signs, _We’ll get her back._

Between the morphine and the pain and the lingering remnants of emotions he refuses to name, his hands are like lead. He raises them, but his fingers are thick, clumsy. They want to cling to the powder-burned fabric of Numbers’ shirt, drag through his hair, trace every line and contour in his face, and never let go.

The words won’t come, so he just shakes his head.

_She wants us to find her,_ Numbers signs, as if Wrench hadn’t seen her last words to them, as if he hadn’t known what she was screaming about even without hearing it. Numbers willing to go up against the FBI to get Olivia back. He’d looked for every opportunity to leave her behind; he doesn’t even _like_ kids, but regardless he’d envisioned some soft-focus future where they made their strange family-by-chance into something permanent. _She wants to come with us._

He nods, and feels like an idiot. _Do you have a getaway car?_  

_How do you think I got us here?_ Stolen, of course. Wrench hopes it’s not the FBI agent’s car, but no, Numbers doesn’t seem _worried,_ exactly, and they—somehow—haven’t attracted attention. Yet. They will, they’ve left a pile of dead bodies behind them, and they’ll have to move soon. He wonders where the fuck they are.

Wrench shifts up against the headboard, his leg and ribcage straining at even this slight movement. _She’s eleven,_ he signs. _You remember being that age?_

Numbers shrugs. He can’t really imagine what Numbers must have been like at that age either. Had he known, that early, what the family business was? Had they made him watch? 

_She killed Reinhardt,_ Wrench signs. Hadn’t even startled at the gunshot. He shouldn’t have been surprised; she’s heard more of them than he has.

_Good,_ Numbers replies.

_How old were you the first time you killed someone?_

_22._ Numbers doesn’t ask him the same question—he knows all about Wrench’s first time, probably even got the embarrassing details, like the fact that Wrench had thrown up after and sat there shaking by the cooling corpse for hours. But he can see the understanding dawn on his partner’s face. They tried to save her, and instead they’ve made her just like them.

_I told you about my family,_ Wrench signs. _Think about your own family. What kind of life would she have with us?_

_What the fuck do you know about my family?_ Numbers signs, violence in every gesture. He swallows; Wrench watches the up-and-down movement of his throat, his near-invisible wince of pain. They’re so fucked up, both of them. _She’ll never forgive us._

_I know,_ Wrench signs. _I can live with it._ It must show on his face that he can’t, even to someone as emotionally defective as his partner. _She deserves better than what we got. What we’d have given her._ Wrench tries to focus on the brush of Numbers’ thumb on his cheek instead of the bone-deep ache of his leg. _Let’s go somewhere less shitty next._

_Where?_

He shrugs. _San Francisco. I could hold your hand in public._

Numbers smiles thinly. He leans forward, smoothes back the sweat-drenched curls plastered to Wrench’s forehead. _You could fucking try._  

Wrench closes his eyes and, his partner’s head pillowed on his shoulder, sleeps, this time, without dreaming.

* * *

After two decades at the Bureau and five years in Fargo, everything Budge keeps there fits neatly into one large cardboard box—except, oddly, his laptop, which is Bureau property anyway. He hasn’t had an office in over a year; there’s no desk, let alone a room with a door, which belongs to him and to him alone. Instead of a framed family photo, he has a blurry picture of Lorne Malvo tacked to the wall and around it, clippings from the Fargo case. There’s one of the man he now knows to be called Numbers, and he wonders where the photo came from, since they’d just found him slumped over in the snow with no identification on him and no legal name ever given. He’s hesitating, about to tear it down, when he hears the echo of metal striking the concrete floor above the softer sound of unsteady footsteps.

“A warden tells a prisoner he will be executed at noon on one day during the following week,” Budge says without looking up, “but the day itself will be a surprise to him.”

“Bill…” Pepper says. “Not now.” There’s less of his voice. There seems—when Budge at last lifts his head—to be less of him in general; his suit is baggy on him, and he looks paler, drawn and grey in the flickering overhead lights. Budge motions for him to sit down, then remembers that the box is sitting on his chair and hastily removes it so that Pepper can claim it, except there’s nowhere to stick it that isn’t already covered with precariously balanced files, so he juggles it while Pepper carefully balances on his crutches and gingerly lowers himself into the seat. Budge ignores the stab of guilt that reminds him that he should have visited more. 

“The prisoner thinks he can avoid the hanging. It can’t happen on Friday, because it’s the last possible day, so he would see it coming. But it can’t happen on Thursday, either, because excluding Friday, Thursday is the last possible day he can be hanged.”

Pepper coughs. Reflexively, he touches the scar on the side of his neck. “I didn’t think you were the type to slip out without saying goodbye.” 

“But he can’t be hanged Wednesday either, because—”

“What did he do?”

“Huh?”

“The prisoner. Why’s he being hanged?”

_Because he’s the victim of an outmoded justice system that places retribution above rehabilitation,_ Budge thinks, and shrugs instead. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“You’re being a moron.” Pepper lifts up one of the crutches and thumps the side of the box with it.

“Says the damned fool who’s back to work when he could be taking sweet, sweet paid medical leave.”

“I’m not back,” Pepper says. “I’m here ‘cause Shelley called. Said you’d handed in your resignation. For some reason she thought I could talk you out of it.”

Budge eyes the ceiling, where somewhere above, the fucking _receptionist_ is concerned about his career and mental stability. She must be the only one who’ll be sad to see him go. “I’m not giving them the satisfaction,” he says. “Only thing lower than this place is the parking garage.”

“They’ll clear you.” Pepper sounds a little stronger, or at least confident. “Shit, Bill, you rescued a little girl. All those girls. Rooted out DEA corruption. The rest…”

“I had them in my sights.” The box is, suddenly, unbearably heavy. Budge leans against the end of one of the shelves, feels it slide in his grip. He puts it down on the floor. Nothing in it means all that much to him; he can clear out his apartment and be on the road tomorrow, if he wanted to. “Both of them. And I let them go.”

Pepper doesn’t speak for a time.

“The way I see it,” he says at last. “One of those assholes saved my life. From what Olivia says—”

“How is she?” Budge interrupts, grateful for an opportunity to change the subject. 

Pepper laughs. “She’s hell on wheels. Started school last week.”

“Yeah?” Budge really has no idea when the school year starts; the commercials and window displays managed to completely evade his attention this time around.

“Punched a boy in the jaw for trying to kiss her. Vi had to go explain the situation.” He looks proud. At least, Budge thinks, that much worked out. “There’s a few hiccups with the paperwork. They still can’t find her mom, but—”

But the only other people who care about what happens to her are miles away, if they know what’s good for them. So, for now, until there’s that inevitable knock on the door, until her adoptive parents can no longer keep the wolves outside at bay, little Olivia finally has a home.

“She nervous about the trial?”

“Yeah,” Pepper says. “Yeah, but she knows she’s safe now. That’s on you, Bill.” 

It isn’t, but he’ll take whatever consolation he can. He paces—then stops, because it’ll be _months_ before Pepper can pace, and he doesn’t want to think of what it must have cost him to come here and make his pointless appeal for Budge to stay—and perches on the edge of the cart, fiddling with his laptop.

“You okay?” Pepper asks, and Budge thinks that he should have been the one to lead with that. Five years of working with the guy and they’ve never learned to communicate. He wonders if the hit men have an easier time than he does. Numbers had been depressed, sure, maybe more damaged than anyone Budge has ever met, but he hadn’t been _alone_. 

“Yeah, fine,” Budge says, and the faces on the wall mock him. “No, not really.” He strikes the top of the cart with a violence that surprises him, the coil spring of professional and personal humiliation at last bursting free. “I was so close. If only—” His normally quick tongue freezes in his mouth. If only Lorne Malvo hadn’t been so brutally effective, wiping out his case before he could solve it. If only he’d been watching closer. If only he’d been a better agent, more observant of the world instead of pondering, always, its myriad imperfections and contradictions. If only Numbers was slightly more of a dickhead, slightly less lovesick and slightly less brave, than he’d turned out to be in the end.

Which reminds him that he hasn’t really looked at the laptop in the weeks since the shootout. It’s technically evidence, but the Bureau doesn’t know that. It’s been on standby and the first thing that pops up, when he opens it, is the blank page with Numbers’ last typed words—no doubt intended to be a suicide note—to him. 

“Weird guy,” Pepper observes, wheeling the office chair closer. “Weirder than you, maybe. And that belongs to the Bureau, by the way; you’re not supposed to be handing it off to criminals.”

“It was the only way to question him,” Budge says. “He can’t talk.” That’s when he notices that there are several other windows open. Files from the Fargo case, of course. “Shit. He’s tampered with the files.” 

It’s all there, the typed transcripts of his notes, Pepper’s, scans of crime scene and autopsy reports, and it’s on one of the latter that he notices a yellow tab on the PDF.

Most of the bodies didn’t come with names, not real ones at least. At best, they got the pseudonyms that the syndicate members called themselves, and usually not even that. Unknown Male #1, the guy whose abrupt defenestration was what had finally drawn Budge’s attention to the massacre going on above his head, is, according to the annotations, _Jergen we called him the Aussie. Couldn’t refuse a dare. Once saw him stick three ghost peppers up his ass because he thought it would get him laid._

“What the fuck?” Pepper cranes up to see, and he lowers the laptop so that they can both click through it.

There are four more notes under the first. Budge is afraid to look after seeing what the second one says. All of the files are marked up like that, most multiple times. There are no full names, no incriminating information, not that it would matter, given that the subjects are all dead. The notes are nearly startling in their innocence, a litany of personal quirks and mundane foibles, drink preferences, sexual proclivities, children, legitimate and otherwise, lovers, presumably left to grieve.

Unknown Male #14, according to the notes, was a decent lay at some point before the contents of his head ended up in a bloody splatter fanned out across the floor. Unknown Male #8, dressed in a suit, slumped against an office desk with his head bowed towards what remains of his chest, is _Aaron mostly an asshole got me high for the first time when I was 13 then covered for me._ The typing is worse than what he’d come to expect from Numbers; he must have written them in the early morning hours when Budge had—recklessly, now that he thinks about it—fallen asleep, leaving his quarry-turned-ally alone with the computer.

Taken in total—and there’s more, sprinkled throughout the files, probably hours of reading if he’s to make any use of them—they’re less a confession than an Impressionist portrait, at once titillating and wholly meaningless. It’s almost embarrassing to read, like peeking into his parents’ drawers. Just lives, as if the members of the syndicate had each punched a clock for every day of their careers before Malvo had walked into their office and snuffed them out. Each as awkwardly suited to a life of crime as Numbers himself, who’d killed dozens, maybe hundreds, of people for money but who had clung to an old romance novel and a stuffed elephant because they reminded him of the people he’d lost.

“Why would he do that?” Pepper asks.

Budge can think of about a thousand reasons why. “He said he’d tell me everything he knew. Maybe it was closure. Or something.” 

“Or something,” Pepper agrees, and they—Pepper sitting, and Budge standing—stare at the wall for a long time, until Budge breaks the silence.

“Did you know,” Budge says, “that there’s a condition that makes people’s toes spontaneously amputate? No reason, just bam, your body rejects a part of you, a little part. Bit by bit.”

“As if I didn’t have enough shit to worry about.” He taps the side of Budge’s shoe with his crutch. “Don’t go.” 

“What?”

“Don’t go,” Pepper says. “At least not like this. You’re a complete freak, but you deserve better than to slink away in shame. You think anyone else in this building would have gotten that guy to talk? Busted up a human trafficking ring? If the Bureau doesn’t recognize that, they’re fucking idiots.”

“Well…” 

“He’s hanged on a Wednesday,” Pepper says. He makes jazz hands. “Surprise. I’ve heard that one before.”

“It’s anticlimactic.” 

“I dunno, man,” Pepper says. “Maybe there doesn’t need to be some deep meaning to any of it. Maybe it just sits there, eating at you for the rest of your life, but not killing you. Think that’s what your murderous friend there was trying to say. Those guys got up every day, put on a suit and tie, and hurt people for a living, just so they could go home to their families. ‘Til they bumped into something worse than they were, and didn’t make it back.”

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it. Most of us, some confusing mess of good and bad is all we get. Most of us learn to cope.” He stands up, or tries to, and Budge remembers to reach out an arm to steady him. “I should go. You know how Vi worries.” 

“Say hi to her for me,” Budge walks him towards the elevator. “And the kid.”

“Come over for dinner some time,” Pepper replies. “Say hi yourself.” He smiles, strained but genuine, and Budge thinks, if he’s not happy, he’s at least on the road to getting his shit together. Maybe there’s hope for them both.

Budge watches the elevator doors close, and then he’s alone again, facing a room full of files. He doesn’t need to be here forever. Just a while, until the world starts to makes sense again.

He glances at the faces on the wall, and starts to unpack.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A return to Fargo, child custody arrangements, furniture breaking sex, and the fluff I promised 17 chapters ago.
> 
> Or, closure, of sorts.

They spend the rest of the summer driving. Autumn finds them in a red-and-gold blur of the Eastern seaboard, up into rural Quebec, because Wrench wants to watch the leaves turn and fish for walleye and bass in the river by their cabin, and after everything they’ve been through together, Numbers doesn’t have the heart to deny him that, or anything else he wants. He’ll admit, later, under duress, that he might have enjoyed it.

When they need money for gas or food, one or both of them drives into town and picks up work, sweeping floors or tacking up posters for shitty bands and junk removal services on utility poles. But it doesn’t cost that much to live like they do, and they spend most of their days arguing over which of the three stations that the twisted coat-hanger on the TV picks up to watch, and once Wrench’s leg is up to it, holding marathon fucking sessions on the narrow bed. 

They almost stay.

Winter, though, finds them back in fucking Fargo.

Or, close enough to it. Fargo’s the one place in the country where whatever safe houses the syndicate used are definitely compromised, and where their faces and descriptions are known enough—even with precautions, and time—that even an anonymous motel is too much of a risk. They set up camp in Sherbrooke, Population Sweet Fuck-All, in the partially collapsed ruins of an abandoned house with a view, through windows stripped of their glass panels, of a rusted-out Studebaker with suicide doors. The house is overrun with dead weeds and vines, and they spend a good hour shoving rubble to the corners of the floor and nailing sheets up as insulation and clearing out the chimney to build a fire. Numbers still thinks it’s going to be too cold to sleep there, but they’ve been driving for days, and once he’s had a few beers and is ensconced on a mattress with two sleeping bags zipped together and draped over his shoulders, the fire crackling and spitting, he’s too tired to insist that they find somewhere else to spend the night.

Neither of them wants to talk about why they’re here.

_A man buys a bottle…_ Numbers signs. He doesn’t think of Budge very often, or even Olivia for that matter, but he’s unsettled at the thought that there’s someone out there who _knows things_ about him—his answer to the riddle, for one—so he considers, now and then, whether he should track the FBI agent down and kill him. He gets maybe halfway through the story before Wrench looks bored and gets up to poke at the fire. 

_Starving,_ Numbers signs, and reaches for a bag of Scrunyuns. 

Wrench gives him a long stare in return. _You should start eating better,_ he signs.

_Onions are technically vegetables,_ Numbers replies. _Therefore this is salad._

Wrench leans the poker up against the wall and sits back down on the mattress next to him, rubbing absentmindedly at his knee. _I mean it. I want you around for a long time._

_I’m unkillable._ He aims a toothy snarl at Wrench before popping another handful of fried death wish into his mouth. The last thing he needs now, _here,_ of all places, is for the guy to get sentimental. He might be a decade older and half a foot shorter than his partner, but he was murdering people for money when Wrench was in middle school. _I can still take you._

_Try me, old man._

Slowly, and never breaking eye contact, Numbers puts the bag down and licks crumbs off one finger at a time, ending with the middle one, which he leaves upraised for a moment.

Then he lunges. He catches Wrench around the waist and almost manages to knock him over. Wrench tosses him down on the mattress and tries to pin him, and _shit,_ he’s already half-hard with his partner’s strong hands pressing down on his chest, legs straddling him, and the fleeting thought that countless unfortunates have died looking up at this very sight.

_You going to behave?_ Wrench signs. He has to lift his hands off Numbers to do it, which is unacceptable, so Numbers squirms free and tackles him again, somehow ending up kneeling across Wrench’s lap. He’s got a split second to worry that maybe Wrench shouldn’t be doing this yet before he lifts them both off the mattress and hauls Numbers onto what had once been a dining room table.

Wrench is on top of him instantly, rocking into his hips, tugging at Numbers’ hair. He doesn’t hear the splintering sound of old wood, and Numbers has just enough time to barrel at him and slam him into the corner of the room before the table collapses under their combined weight. The sole surviving piece of art on the wall, a framed and ghastly rendering of the town before its downfall, waits a comedic second or two before crashing to the ground.

_Give up?_ Numbers signs. 

In response, Wrench unzips his fly and shoves a hand down his pants. 

_Call it a draw then,_ Numbers tells him, chest heaving, and Wrench presses him against the wall—not as roughly as he might once have, wary as he is of exacerbating the ever-present ache in his back—one forearm bent across Numbers’ collarbone, the other rubbing at his cock until he’s painfully hard, the whole time grinning wickedly at the reaction he’s getting.

Numbers swipes at Wrench’s belt buckle. His hands are, at last, completely steady, have been, for the most part, since he burst into the trailer and gunned down the bastards who’d been hurting his partner, but Wrench is grinding against him and he can’t quite get a grip, can’t think past how cold he is everywhere where he’s not touching Wrench, the burning bliss every place their skin makes contact. It’s a Herculean effort to unfasten the damned thing—a hideous brass monstrosity with a longhorn skull on it—and yank Wrench’s jeans down his thighs before Wrench remembers to pay attention, and he takes advantage of his partner’s momentary discombobulated state to slide out of his grip, fall to his knees, and swallow his cock.

No one’s ever accused him of fighting fair.

Various joints and muscles remind him of his age and his scars, but it’s worth it to hear the low moan that emerges, involuntarily, from Wrench’s throat. It took years to get Wrench to a point where he’d make any kind of noise at all, but there’s no one around for miles and no need to be self-conscious. Numbers takes him in as deep as he can, kneads at his ass, at the knot of scar tissue above his knee. Breathing with a dick in his mouth isn’t as easy as it used to be, and if Wrench thrusts the wrong way it feels like he’s being punched in the throat, but Wrench is so attuned to his every little movement that even in their frenzy, it doesn’t happen often. Wrench’s soft cries, the heat and weight of him, go straight to Numbers’ dick. Wrench tangles his fingers in his hair, pushing his head up and down until Numbers can sense he’s close to the edge, then lifts Numbers to his feet and drags him back over to the mattress, stopping to give the broken table a kick out of the way.

It’s too cold to undress more than they already have. Numbers climbs on top of Wrench and pulls the blankets over both of them, and Wrench, mocking, makes a gesture of surrender.

Numbers kisses him, and for all that Wrench’s scruffy beard feels strange against his uncomfortably bare face, for all that he hates this town and everything it represents, he’s got Wrench’s fingernails raking over his back, Wrench’s teeth biting his shoulder, Wrench’s cock rock solid against his leg to distract him. He runs his hand down the side of his partner’s face; Wrench catches his fingers in his mouth and licks and sucks at them. Numbers scrambles out of his boxers and pushes his dripping fingers into his ass, watching Wrench watch him do it. His partner seems amused, trapped underneath him, occasionally signing filthy encouragement until at last Numbers lines himself up and sinks down onto his cock.

God, he needed this. Wrench bucks up into him, filling him to the hilt, a shockwave slamming through the core of him until Numbers is all but delirious with pleasure, and just as they’re both close to spilling over, turns unexpectedly gentle, cradling his face in his huge hands. Numbers shudders and comes against his stomach, cursing him in stifled, silent mumblings, rolling on his back as he hears Wrench noisily finish next to him. 

_About your story,_ Wrench signs as they lie, limp and spent, clothing stiff and sticky with each other’s come. He’ll have time to be disgusted by it later, once the inertia’s worn off.

_It’s not my story._

_I think you had the wrong answer._

He hadn’t even known Wrench was paying attention. _Budge said he didn’t think there was an answer._

_There is,_ Wrench insists. _I’ve read it. The man’s wife buys the bottle back in the end. She loves him more than she fears hell._

Numbers snorts. _Because love. Right._

Wrench nods.

_It’s a cheat; God doesn’t just change the rules like that._

Wrench, eyes big and wide as a child’s, in all earnestness, answers: _What use is He if he can’t?_

_How the fuck can you be such a romantic when you kill people for a living?_

_I don’t anymore,_ Wrench says, like it’s some kind of victory. He lifts up Numbers’ shirt to trace little spirals into the drying mess on his belly, humming tonelessly to himself. It’s almost enough to lull Numbers to sleep, tense as he is, but he’s gripped by a sudden panic.

_Do you understand how fucking improbable it is that anyone in the world could love me?_

Wrench runs a thumb over Numbers’ lower lip, teasing. _Who says I love you?_

_Of course you do. You’re fucking—_ he spells it out— _besotted. Always have been._

_Maybe,_ he acknowledges, kisses the top of Numbers’ head, and gathers him close. 

Neither of them sleeps.

* * *

The yard beside Cheney Middle School is dusted in snow, each blade of grass preserved in a shard of crystalline ice. It’s midday, but there’s no movement outside of the dull brown-and-glass shell of the building. Wrench had expected something livelier, colorful snowsuits and snowball fights and whatever kids got up to these days; instead, everything is still, and oddly peaceful, beneath the frost.

_Maybe we got the time wrong. Or it’s the wrong one._

Numbers checks his watch. _Maybe they don’t have recess anymore. Too busy with standardized testing._

_They have to have recess,_ Wrench signs. The alternative is offensive to every one of his sensibilities. Then again, by that age he was skipping classes most days, so what the fuck does he know? _You want to go do the other thing?_  

Numbers looks like he would rather be doing anything—even waiting outside a school in a car with questionable heating and an unusually fidgety partner—than doing the other thing, but he nods, and Wrench warms up the engine.

The ten minutes it takes to drive across the I-94 to the cemetery isn’t enough time for Numbers to gather his thoughts, and they have most of a day to kill, so they walk by the edge of the river, beneath the black skeletons of the trees. Numbers wanders off and Wrench is left staring at the ice crusting the surface of the water in delicate fractals while his partner screams or hits things or cries or whatever he needs to leave Wrench to do. Wrench prods at the ice with one foot, and feels a satisfying crunch under the toe of his boot, the freeze giving way in cracks to the rushing current beyond.

When Numbers comes back, Wrench just asks: _Do you want me there?_

Numbers rolls his eyes and says, _Obviously, jackass._ Wrench could have put a consoling arm around him if he’d had the good sense to fall for someone normal, but as it is, he just stays close, looming behind Numbers’ shoulder in case his partner suddenly decides to bolt. 

The graves themselves are unremarkable, and Wrench isn’t sure that the names carved into them are real, but they’re neat and well maintained. Supposedly someone paid, some offshoot of the syndicate in another state, respect for Mr. Tripoli, acknowledgment of debts owed and favors cashed in. Numbers claims he doesn’t know who took care of the arrangements, who might have survived to bury the dead. When the funerals happened, he was fighting for his life in the hospital with surgical staples keeping his throat together. He probably wouldn’t have gone anyway. 

His parents, he’s told Wrench on the drive up, are back home—he doesn’t specify where “home” is, though Wrench gathered from things other people let slip in the past that he’s originally from Missouri. The rest of his family, the ones who looked after him and his mother after his father’s death, the ones who put a gun in his hand when he was barely out of his teens, is buried here, along with his employer and co-workers and the poor fucker who answered the phones. All buried together, equal in death, in identical graves.

Numbers places a stone on top of each one.

_Why?_ Wrench asks.

_To weigh their souls down,_ Numbers signs. _So they don’t escape._

_Some people would just bring flowers,_ Wrench replies, and feels a little bad that he didn’t think of it. He couldn’t have called a single one of the dead men his friend—hell, he didn’t even _like_ any of them—but they gave him steady employment, gave him a partner who woke up something in him that he’d thought was buried along with his sister, and for that, he can forgive them.

_You think they deserve flowers?_ _I’m here to make sure the fuckers stay put._ He stops in front of the last one, places a rock on it, traces his gloved hand over the engraving, and abruptly turns back towards Wrench, his expression unreadable. _There. Now you know my last name._

He says it like it’s a gift. Maybe it is; it’s not like Numbers has anything else tangible to give him. Wrench doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He puts his hand on Numbers’ arm, and this time Numbers doesn’t shove him off. He stands in front of twenty-two graves and leans his head into Wrench’s shoulder.

Wrench can’t grieve. But for a slip of the knife blade, and Numbers’ stubborn resilience, there might be one more stone, and since there isn’t, there’s not the slightest bit of regret in him. He pulls away enough to sign, _I’ve known your real name for years, asshole._

_You never said anything._

_I don’t give a fuck who your family is. The guy who learned ASL for me and had my back on all those hits was named Mr. Numbers. Why would I need to call you something else?_

Numbers mouths, “Oh,” and lets Wrench hold him for several seconds longer than Wrench would have expected. Then he shrugs him off and starts walking for the car.

_I can see why you don’t go by that,_ Wrench signs, catching up to him. 

_It’s not as bad as your name._  

_You are never learning my name._

_Maybe I know already. Maybe I read your personnel file when you were assigned to me._

_The fuck you did,_ Wrench signs, _you’re way too lazy_ , and Numbers stops and turns to stare up at him. It takes Wrench a second to pinpoint what he’s seeing. It’s not the shark’s smile Numbers reserves for those about to meet an ignominious and violent end. For the first time, he looks something close to—well, if not _happy_ as such, more at peace than Wrench has ever seen him.

Numbers was right, he decides. They don’t get to have families.

But they get to have this.

* * *

Olivia thinks for a few minutes that the battering at her window is hail. She’d kind of gathered that the weather in Fargo is terrible most of the time, but she’s never known cold, not like this. So hail is a thing that happens here, apparently. 

Besides, no one throws rocks at someone’s bedroom window in the middle of the night like they’re in a cheesy rom-com. No one does that.

She sits up. From her bed, all she can see is a grey, indistinct kind of darkness, her room—her actual room, which she gets to herself, and that’s maybe enough reason to not run away from her new home just yet—cast in shadow, the sky a shade brighter, streetlamps reflected off the snow that has piled in tidal drifts during the night. Mrs. Pepper says they’ll have a white Christmas, says it like it’s a good thing. Maybe it is; she hasn’t seen snow in her whole life until a few weeks ago. Olivia grabs the quilt off the bed and drapes it over her shoulders and pads across the carpeted floor.

She has a brief thought, as she presses her forehead to the cool glass, that it might be Reinhardt’s guys, or Morales’, that there might be a sniper rifle pointed at the window, but then she sees them, unmistakable silhouettes under a streetlight, Numbers perched on the hood of the car and Wrench standing on the front lawn, face turned up towards her. She raises her finger to her lips, sees him nod, and then she waves and it’s all she can do to burst into tears.

Mr. and Mrs. Pepper are both sleeping. Mr. Pepper is still on pretty heavy sedatives at night, so she doubts she’ll disturb him as she tiptoes past their bedroom in her bathrobe and slippers. She doesn’t want to have to explain that she’s sneaking out of the house to go meet the hit men he was chasing for over a year.

The porch light goes on when she opens the door, and Wrench throws an arm over his face in the sudden blast of light. She runs down the icy path and throws herself on him, worrying just slightly too late that he might still be hurting from the gunshot wound. Mr. Pepper is staring down months of PT. She doubts that Wrench’s lifestyle gives him access to doctors and physiotherapists, so he could be in worse shape. He looks okay, though; kind of scraggly, like he’s been living rough, but better than she’d seen him last. 

He picks her up and she wraps her arms around his neck, her face to his pulse, tears running down her cheeks already turning to ice. He carries her to the car. The engine’s running, and it’s a little warmer than it is outside. She climbs in the back seat between them. She hugs Wrench one more time, then, deciding he must be fine, sits up and punches his arm. 

“You were supposed to come back,” she says, before she remembers that he probably can’t read her lips from this angle.

Numbers taps her on the shoulder and spells out: _We did._

Three months. She hadn’t known if they were dead or alive, if they were rotting in jail somewhere or had managed to escape, if they’d even given a shit or were happy to be relieved of the burden of looking after her. 

She had begged them. Alone at night, she had even prayed, or at least whispered to herself, her words too loud in the sanctum of her bedroom, that they would come back for her. Every night, she’d reminded herself that they’d never made her any promises. 

“You guys look so weird,” she says. It’s like they swapped facial hair, for one thing. Wrench can’t grow a thick beard like Numbers can, but he’s trying, and what she can see of his hair is bleached blond. Numbers already has stubble, even though he’s probably shaved that morning. He has puffy cheeks and probably no one would take him seriously as an assassin, ever again, if they knew that. They’re both wearing what seems to be the standard uniform here for this time of year, down-stuffed parkas with hoods drawn over their heads. It wouldn’t be a disguise to anyone who knew them—Numbers might be able to blend into a crowd, as long as he keeps the scarf on and hood up, but Wrench is just too big and hulking—but to someone working from an APB printed off a bad fax, it might be enough that they fly under the radar. What the fuck are they even _doing_ here?

She twists upwards to make sure Wrench can see her this time, and signs, _I missed you so much._

She’s gotten it right. She can tell from his indulgent smile. She’s been practicing that one a lot, not that she thought she would ever see him again.

“I’m taking lessons after school at the library,” she adds proudly. “I told Mr. and Mrs. Pepper that I want to be an interpreter when I grow up.”

_Are they treating you okay?_ Numbers signs a lot slower than he does when he’s talking to Wrench, but he doesn’t spell it out for her.

“Yeah. I mean, they are super overprotective, but—yeah.” When they first said that she was going to a cop’s house, she thought it meant that they were arresting her. But it turns out that he was one of the FBI agents who helped expose Hutchinson, and he and his wife had wanted kids for a long time, and Bill Budge had been keen to keep his vow that she wouldn’t end up a ward of the state.

The first night she stayed there, Mr. Pepper had told her how he remembered lying in a pool of his own blood and Wrench, badly wounded himself, trying to staunch the bleeding. Giving her a home, even if it hadn’t been the one any of them had ever planned for, was the least he could do in return. 

“But you’re here to get me now,” Olivia says. “Right?”

Numbers looks over at Wrench and signs a translation, as if he needs to.

“Right?” she asks again, and Numbers turns away from her, hunching down into the car door in a miserable ball. 

“I can kill someone,” Olivia says. She accompanies it with the sign for _kill,_ in case he doesn’t understand, then the sign for _shoot,_ just to be sure. “You saw me. I can do it.”

Wrench shakes his head.

“It’s not fair,” she says, then signs: _Don’t you want me to come with you?_

Before she’s finished, his big arms are around her, cocooning her in a bundle of quilt, his fuzzy chin mashed into her head. She clings to him, convinced if she just stays there, if she doesn’t let go of him no matter what, he’ll have to take her wherever he’s going. 

She can’t breathe with her face buried in his parka, though, and when she draws back, he’s reaching for something in an inside pocket. It’s a folded piece of paper with a map hand-drawn in pen. 

_Pirate treasure?_ she spells out. He shows her the sign for “pirate” and she giggles because it hasn’t come up in her lessons but it’s exactly what she would have guessed it was.

Numbers lifts his head and signs, _We don’t have much time._

_This is in Lubbock,_ Wrench writes on a new sheet of paper. _When you turn 18, meet us here._ He takes the map and points to an X.

“What is it?”

_Your college fund,_ he writes _. You earned it._

She tries to figure out how much that is. They would have spent a lot on gas and motels, and weapons, and food, and clothes for her, but there must still be some left. Probably not enough for college tuition, though. _Why 18?_

They exchange troubled glances. Numbers signs, _If you still want to kill people for a living by then, we’ll make sure you’re good at it. Until then you get a childhood._

Her eyes are burning; she rubs at them to keep the tears in. She’s cried enough in front of them, she’s not going to do it again, not when she’s trying to convince them that she’s as tough as they are. 

Besides, Wrench looks like he’s about to cry too, and she doesn’t think she can cope with seeing that.

“You gonna tell me where you’re going?” Neither of them answers. Away from Fargo, she assumes. Away from her, and the FBI agents that might still be obligated to arrest them if they make themselves obvious. Away from whatever ugly past they’d moved to Albuquerque to escape in the first place. “Okay. I get it. You don’t want me to follow you.”

_You would make a good interpreter,_ Wrench tells her.

_I’d make a good hit man._ She pokes him and signs: _14_.

She’ll be in high school by then. Wrench probably didn’t finish high school either, so why should he expect her to bother? It’s still years away, but not quite as incomprehensible and distant as 18 seems.

Numbers glares, but with his chipmunk cheeks and everything she knows about him, he’s not very menacing anymore.

_16,_ Wrench counters.

She’ll be allowed to drive at 16. She guesses that’s pretty important, if she’s going to be a hit man some day. Hit woman. Whatever. She’ll have to be able to get away, whether or not she has them to rescue her.

She made it eleven years on her own, without anyone to take care of her. She tells herself that she can make it another five. She has to.

_Okay. Deal. 16._ She reaches out her hand and Wrench shakes it. 

Wrench signs, _partner,_ and she signs it back to him, throws her arms around him and holds onto him as tight as she can.

“I love you,” she whispers into his parka. He’ll never say it back, won’t even sign it, and anyway, he can’t hear her, but she thinks his arms tighten around her just a little bit. “Thank you for everything.”

She cries, then. Big, choking sobs from rising in her throat, and she’s never been so relieved that he can’t hear, not that Numbers won’t tell him about it later. Her face is hidden against him and neither man makes a sound; she waits for her tears to ebb in a silence that no longer seems familiar.

_How do I know you’ll be there?_ Olivia asks, as though she can demand that they still be alive in five years. That they would still remember her. She might as well ask for a million bucks and a pony, for them to give up a life of crime and live together like one, happy, fucked-up family. “Sorry. Stupid question. But…” 

_Go home,_ Numbers tells her, and it’s funny that he can convey gruffness with just a sharp hand gesture. He’s watching the house nervously.

Should she shake his hand too? Hug him? She’s seen him at his worst—well, probably not his _worst_ worst _,_ but she’d seen him scared and emotional—but that doesn’t mean he’s any less prickly. She settles for a quiet, “Take good care of him, okay? I’ll see you in a couple years. I’ll be there, I promise.”

It’s as close as any of them comes to saying goodbye. Wrench holds the car door open for her and she climbs out, and she forces herself to take each step back towards the front of the house without fleeing. When she puts her hand on the doorknob, she looks back; they’re in the front seat of the car now, but the car’s still idling by the curb.

Olivia lets herself inside and sits by the front window until the car pulls away, the warmth of the house a stark contrast to the frigid outside air. She adjusts the quilt around her shoulders and when she looks up again, she sees Pepper in the chair across from her.

“Shit,” she says, and immediately covers her mouth. “Um. How long have you—”

“Long enough,” he says. “I didn’t get a good look at that plate, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

She picks at her lip so she doesn’t smile. She thinks living here, with him and his wife, might not be so bad after all. 

“Is it gonna be a problem?” he asks.

“They’re not…I mean. No. Er, no sir?” She’s not sure how she’s supposed to address him, even if the adoption paperwork does go through.

“Please,” Pepper says, “do _not_ ever call me sir.”

“They just wanted to know if I was okay.”

Pepper stares past her, out the window, but there’s no movement on the street. They’re gone, safe, or as safe as two wanted criminals on the run can be. “Are you?” he asks. 

There’s a map in her pocket to a stolen fortune and an uncertain future, and she’ll take it out, when she’s alone, and dream about what will be waiting for her when she follows it. And she can mourn the end of her long, strange summer, but with it comes something brand new, a chance for a normal life and the home she’s never had.

“Yeah,” Olivia says. “Yeah. I am now.”

* * *

_Somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, 2008_

 

It’s raining again. 

Wrench appreciates the novelty of the constant downpour, especially when he’s coming in from it, into the warm and dry inside, instead of heading out into it. He shrugs off his coat, deposits the envelope with the money on the shelf by the door, shakes the water out of his hair. The two nights when he pulls the late shift at the bar, opposite Numbers’ daytime schedule at the library, are the longest of the week, but Cindy, who waitresses on weekends, thinks he’s cute—and appreciates having a big scary guy around to ward off customers who get too friendly with her—and always gives him a cut of her tips. He’s not complaining.

In the back of his mind, this time of year should warrant a foot of snow on the ground, engines that won’t start, and a bone-deep chill reverberating through each one of his old scars. Instead, there are a few stubborn patches of muddy white that cling to the bases of the tall pines, melting in slow rivulets as the sun climbs an arc above the clouds. Fog hangs thick over the mountain, and its snow-capped peak floats in a sky washed into abstract watercolor, grey on grey. It’s so far from the winters he’s known anywhere else that he can imagine, in his occasional early-morning flights of fancy, that the endless torrents of rain have carried his past away with it. A thousand years of heartfelt repentance—even if he were capable of it— couldn’t wipe his slate clean, but he thinks, at least this, him and Numbers, together, and the girl, away from them but safe, alive, at least he didn’t fuck this part up.

Numbers hates it, but Numbers hates everywhere. He’s mollified by the fact that he can wear a black overcoat and a scarf most of the year, and when they drive down the coast to Seattle, he matches the prevailing color scheme and doesn’t warrant a second glance from anyone.

Wrench thinks that Numbers is lying about how irritating the rain gets, pounding against the windows. He can feel its rhythm through the thin walls of their apartment when he puts his hand to the peeling paint, a perpetual spring thaw like a heartbeat. He doubts anywhere will ever be home, but this is close enough.

He strips down to his boxers, leaving a trail of wet clothes approaching the bedroom, and slides into the bed beside Numbers. 

His partner twitches in his sleep. The rain on glass casts blue-speckled shadows over their skin, where Wrench’s hand cups Numbers’ bare shoulder, to make it look like their flesh is cut from the same pockmarked stone. The illusion is lost the moment Numbers’ eyelashes flutter, and Wrench tightens his grip on him so as he surfaces from whatever nightmare playing out in the hellscape tangle of his subconscious, he’ll know where he is, who he’s with. 

Wrench whispers to him to go back to sleep, it’s still early, neither of them work tomorrow, and they can sleep in as long as they like. He has no idea how the words come out sounding, if they come out at all, but Numbers seems to like it when Wrench talks to him, even when he makes whatever noise he makes when they’re fucking. His lips move in semblances of words until he’s awake enough to remember that he can’t speak, but when he mumbles into Wrench’s shoulder, Wrench feels the heat of breath against his skin, and it gets across whatever needs to be said.

Going on seventeen blood-soaked years together, and Wrench could go to sleep and wake up next to the misanthropic little shithead for the rest of his fucking life, never regretting a second of it.

There was a time when Numbers would immediately be out of bed, making excuses for why he couldn’t be here, not right now; he’d have brushed off Wrench’s touch and gone cold and efficient, as though he hadn’t been writhing and begging for Wrench’s cock up his ass the night before. He’d be knotting his tie before Wrench had located his pants, and if Wrench ever called him on it, he’d sign something about the need to be a fucking professional, his face stone inscrutability, back turned so that he doesn’t see Wrench call him an asshole.

These days, if he’s not exactly a changed man, he’s at least a lazier one. He shifts over to lie between Wrench’s legs, the sheets draped loosely over them, one hand resting on Wrench’s knee.

There isn’t a part of his body that Wrench hasn’t touched, but it hasn’t become less of a thrill that Numbers allows Wrench’s fingers to play over him, breathes in deep as Wrench’s hands trace the contours of muscle and bone and weave through his hair. His eyes close and his head slides down Wrench’s chest, tilts upward to expose the scar under his beard, burning red beneath the whirls and jags of the flames.

For a moment, Wrench leaves his hand there, index and middle finger pressed to the steady pulse at Numbers’ jugular while his thumb rubs over the bump of his collarbone, and he marvels that this brittle, impossible man could allow himself to be so trusting, so very vulnerable in Wrench’s presence. He can feel every hitch and hesitation in Numbers’ breathing, but Numbers wouldn’t permit this if he didn’t crave it.

_Your hands feel different,_ Numbers signs. 

Both of theirs do—Wrench has noticed it as well—the calluses all in different places, hands worn differently from dishwashing than from firing a gun. He traces his fingers over the tattoo, the ridges and dips of scar tissue, and hopes Numbers means—though he’d never say it—that it feels better. Numbers’ body spread out before him, Wrench follows the lines of each symbol across his flesh, the ones carefully planned and the ones inked in a fit of drunken impulse or jabbed with a prison needle, his entire body a memento mori, a map of grief and tenacity.

Numbers is up, abruptly, standing in the doorway with the light from the window outlining his muscles and scars, worn sweatpants hanging low on his hips, broken and perfect all at once. Wrench follows him into the next room. It’s an extravagance, an extra room, in comparison to their old life, and one that necessitated moving an hour north or so of anything Numbers finds remotely interesting. Weirdly, it had been Numbers that had insisted, and right now it’s mostly full of boxes of various shit accumulated—guns, mostly, which justifies Numbers referring to it as a “contingency plan” when they both know it’s about something else altogether—then other things, dingy paperbacks and bad art that Wrench threatens to hang if Numbers doesn’t pull his share of the cleaning. A guitar he can’t hear, but he likes it when Numbers plays and he rests his head against the purr of the hollow wood. A lone stuffed toy tiger, in case, the way the spare room is _in case_.

_I miss her too,_ Wrench signs.

Numbers looks up at him and scowls. There are some things he’ll never admit, even now. Instead, he says: _We should do something about the mess in here._

What he really means to say is: _What if she comes back to us?_

Wrench hopes she doesn’t. In five years, when they drive out to Crystal’s secret hideaway, he hopes Olivia isn’t there, that she’s found something better to cling to, some boy or girl who makes her heart do the thing that Numbers does to his. That she’s got a family, and friends, and better plans for the future than were ever expected of him. 

He hopes she’ll look back on the memory of him, and Numbers, and the corpse-strewn road they travelled, and keep walking away until she gets someplace good.

But if that doesn’t work out, he thinks, even if they find her razor-sharp and damaged with murder in her eyes, if there’s nothing left for any of them but to burn the world down until they’re the only ones left standing, he’ll be ready for that too. On that day, if it ever comes, they’ll all be together, in the overgrown field with the last rays of sun glittering over the tall grass, the open road ahead and a duffel bag filled with a lifetime of accumulated weaponry in the trunk of a car. He can live with that, too.

There are days they still expect the phone to ring, the front door to come crashing open, the orders to come down from on high or their sins to catch up with them.  Those days, though, are fewer and far between. Wrench wonders if this is how regular people live, if this might become their lives—no syndicate, no assignments, no bodies to dump—just boring jobs that cover the bills, and small town people with bright, ignorant smiles, and each other. His ghosts are well buried, and hardly stir at night. As for Numbers’, well, Wrench just prays those stones he placed are heavy enough to keep them contained.

He takes a long look at the detritus of their past, piled over the dusty wood floor, and shoulders the door closed. Turns to Numbers and signs: _We got time._

Numbers’ mouth twists, like he’s about to argue, before thinking better of it. _Guess we do._

And then he crushes his partner to him, as though everything depends upon him, kisses him until they both need to come up for breath, and for the longest time, their hands are kept busy, and neither of them needs to say anything at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, everyone, for reading—especially since this turned out to be far longer than I intended. Hope you all enjoyed the ride!


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